Looking for help with a motorcycle project (weatherproofing, IR etc)

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charleslaine
 
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Joined: Wed Jun 05, 2013 4:51 pm

Looking for help with a motorcycle project (weatherproofing, IR etc)

Post by charleslaine »

I thought I'd check in with the adafruit community to see if anyone has any suggestions or tips with a little project that I'm working on. :wink:

I've got a BMW touring bike with tons of electronics crammed into it. GPS, iPod dock, CBradio, intercom, and radar detector etc.

Particularly, I've got a radar detector system integrated into the bike that is really intended for a car. I need to modify this radar detector to make it more suitable for motorcycle applications. I am trying to accomplish the following

1. Weatherproof/modify the 5-button "mini control panel". Here's a picture of the item in question... Image
This small little control panel is not designed for external use. It is very susceptible to rain penetration, and moisture in general. And when this happens, the control panel becomes unusable and generally spazzes out!

In addition to the moisture problem, it's also too small for motorcycle use. When you are wearing gloves, the buttons are just too small and fiddly to be of any use.

So, what I would like to do is crack this thing open and rewire it with larger waterproof buttons in some kind of enclosure that can be mounted on the bike's fairing. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions regarding this sort of enclosure design, with waterproofing in mind?

2. Next, and perhaps more interesting, this radar detector has a small LED that illuminates whenever it is activated by a radar signal (ie slow down now or get a ticket!). On a car, this LED would be mounted on your dash or instrument panel to provide a second level of notification in addition to the audio alert. But on a motorcycle, in bright sunlight, this LED is extremely hard to notice unless you are looking right at it.

What I want to do is mount the LED in my helmet! I was wondering if there was some sort of way of using line of sight IR between the bike and my helmet. The idea is to replace the LED with an IR transmitter (mounted directly in front of the rider). And in the helmet, I would mount the LED attached to an IR receiver.

So whenever the radar detector goes off, it would send a signal to the IR transmitter, which would in turn be picked up by the receiver, which would light up the LED inside my helmet. And since the LED is right there above my eye line inside the helmet and just at the corner of my eye, it would be impossible to not notice it.

Can anyone recommend some small IR components that could be inserted between the radar detector and this LED to essentially turn it into a wireless LED?

Lots of info there, so thanks for reading if you got this far!!!!

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chuckz
 
Posts: 178
Joined: Mon May 30, 2011 11:54 am

Re: Looking for help with a motorcycle project (weatherproofing, IR etc)

Post by chuckz »

If you put the word "motorcycle" in the search box, there are a bunch of posts that you can data-mine with issues similar to yours including this one:

Can someone help out a Marine?
http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.ph ... le#p172131

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