Greetings and Salutations, I found a cheap sports radar gun on Amazon under $70, I want to hack it and use it to build a speed awareness sign for my yard. The off the shelf signs cost $700 and up..
Bing Videos shows a hack, but it is lacking. I think this project will be of interest to many, Please help!
I briefly unlisted this as potential spam. But having watched the video I’ve changed my mind. I’ll be doing a proper reply instead.
Not sure what you mean by “lacking” since not only does it show the schematic he spells out that the arduino monitors the “active” LED and when it turns off because of it’s auto-shut-off feature the arduino cycles power to the sign/radar unit.
Microsoft just grabbed a Youtube video, BING Is Not Google, but if you go to the original video you can see in the comments how it works. And I would not be so sure it’s not a Microsoft AI agent creating fake posts to drum up hits to their pseudo search engine.
Maybe its just my eyesight, but I could not make out the connections. I actually bought the speed gun from amazon and it arrived today, I was advised not to put such a device in my yard where we live, it would just make the problem worse. My wife went out to the road and yellew at a Driver in a black pickup with loud pipes a few days ago and he makes it a point to rev up his engine and make as noise as possible and he guns it in front of our house, then slams on brakes 2 doors down. I priced actual speed alert signs and they start at around $600 and go up to $4,000., I did find a hack that uses a $279 radar module plus a Pi and a handfull of other componets with a buildout around $400. I just thought if I could get the concept out there a savy guru would pick up on it and come up with a buildout for $100 or so. I am going to take it out of the box and see how well it reads cars going by and report back.
The guy in the video just hacks the Arduino and relay to keep the cheap speed sensor/display from automatically turning off. It’s an easy hack. Another hack would be to add a solar panel and battery charge controller so it can be fully hands off.
Sounds like you’d want to put a camera on the speed display because that truck driver seems the type to do stupid things.
That is a pretty hard to follow video, I suspect not done by the person who did the work, but by someone less technical, but still proud of what they did. Hence fuzzy screenshots and panning over the source code and not copy/pasting in description etc..
But also a bit ‘huh?’ as far as I can see all they are really doing is repeatedly turning the radar back on whenever it auto switches off. Using a microcontroller to do this is hilariously over the top. I could do the same with a 555 timer chip, a few resistors, a capacitor and a optoisolator.
The advantage of the more complex Pi based system you describe is that you can probably arrange it with the sensor and display remote from the Pi. Potentially allowing you to add data logging and a webcam to the mix.
Which way to go depends in some part on your technical knowledge and skills, and how much time you want to put in.
And none of the above addresses whether it is a good idea to escalate stuff with this sort of character.