The Bright Block "Bike Gizmo" Is a Smart Light for Citizen Science Data Gathering on Two Wheels

Semi-pseudonymous maker Kelsey is aiming to provide data to monitor both the environment and the provision of cycling infrastructure in cities, under a project dubbed Bright Block — and using a smart bike light which doubles as a citizen science data gathering device.

"This project was initiated at a climate hackathon," Kelsey explains. "We did a proof of concept that a small bike sensor could transmit accelerometer data via Wi-Fi to a backend. The idea was lots of fun and got me thinking about what an at scale implementation could look like. [The Bike Gizmo] is the hardware component of this project, it’s — well, mostly — a bike light, (i.e. the name, Bright Block)! The bike light is a made-at-cost gizmo which is also an [Espressif] ESP32-based climate monitor built to capture and characterize several aspects of biking in the city."

The idea behind the project is at once simple and ambitious: equipping bikes with data gathering hardware which would feed into a smartphone app and, from there, an amalgamation platform for sharing and analysis. In its current incarnation, dubbed Twin Peaks, the Bike Gizmo is based around an Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 with GPS breakout and a Sensirion SEN55 environmental sensor capable of picking up particulate matter, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), oxidizing gases, humidity, and temperature, with a microSD card for local storage.

The environmental sensor and GPS combine to turn a bike into a passive data gatherer for weather and pollution information, with the GPS then further detailing the routes taken by Bike Gizmo-equipped cyclists. A push-button on the light allows for the user to flag a dangerous event — such as a close pass by a car — with the time and location, potentially informing of the need for infrastructure changes to improve safety.

"I made a new enclosure because rubber-banding all the sensors into the old enclosure made me pretty sad," Kelsey writes of the latest incarnation, which uses a 3D-printed housing with a mounting point suitable for use with off-the-shelf bike light mounts. "This one looks like a barcode scanner which is also a little sad, but grateful for resin prints for being generally pretty rad."

More information on the project, which is still in the functional-prototyping stage, is available on Kelsey's Hackaday.io page; links to GitHub repositories for the software have been provided but, at the time of writing, had not yet been opened to the public.