Pedal Power

Pedal Power is an ESW project focused on turning mechanical energy created by pedaling a bicycle into electrical energy. The project has gone through three different major designs. I began working on the project during its second design in my junior year. A huge shout-out goes to Dan Snitzer for both his work on the previous Pedal Power generations, and his guidance while I moved forward with it.

Here you can see the apparatus in its second stage of design, as it was when I joined the project. I bicycle would rest on the two rotating bars, with the back far connected to a motor to generate electricity. The motor is wired to then plug into an outlet in a box mounted with light bulbs. Below, you can see this box, as the system is in action.

These photos represents the primary goal of the project: outreach. The photos were taken at an annual event at the Buffalo Museum of Science. There, we have kids ride the bike, and see the lights light up as they do. This event is twofold; it serves to generate excitement for science and engineering amongst youth, and also to motivate energy conservation. Just think if you had to ride a bike all day just to light your home!
It has been truly rewarding working with these children and sharing in their excitement.

The project, as it was when I joined, had a few major issues. One regarded mechanical stability. As you may have noticed in the photos above, someone was always at each end of the bike to help stabilize it. The third generation of the project addressed this, shown to the left. Sure, we kind of cheated by using an already created bike mount system, but if it's a solution to the problem, it's a solution to the problem!

More important to me, however, was the fact that the system only generated a soft, qualitative output. While great for little kids, we're engineers here, we work in solid, quantitative data! Likewise, I led the design of a data acquisition system for the third generation of the project. Using an Arduino Uno and a current sensor, I put together a data acquisition system to gather voltage and current data, which we could of course then use to calculate power (P=IV)! At the right you can see the system at work at a competition we hosted for who could generate the most power. Within the "black box" that is the light bulb box, the circuit and Arduino board lay. We then interfaced with MATLAB to record data (sent serially) and calculate each person's average power.

Moving forward, we aim to interface with an Android tablet rather than a PC. While I began developing the app, I did not finish it before I graduated. This winter break, I'm looking forward to getting back to Buffalo and finishing it up. I've done preliminary work in learning how to graph data in real time, and how to receive serial data via Bluetooth, but I have yet to complete each portion and tie them together. Hopefully, there will be more to come, with screenshots!