Create your own motorcycle monitor for the race track with a Nano 33 IoT

If you've ever had the pleasure of riding a motorcycle on a track, then you know it gets competitive quickly, even if the competition is yourself. You want to reduce your lap times, increase your lean angle, brake later after a straight and accelerate harder out of a corner. But the only way to get objective data on your improvement is to monitor your actual performance. This device designed by Jesus Soriano collects this data so you can track your progress from one track day to the next.

There are commercial products on the market that offer similar functionality, but they are expensive and give you little control over operation. This project uses open source hardware, so you can hack it to your liking and save some money that would be better spent on tires. Important components include: an Arduino Nano 33 IoT board, a TinyCircuit GPS shield, a SparkFun power stick, a Bitcraze Micro SD card set, and a 1000mAh lithium-ion battery. Soriano simply placed these components in his bike's tail storage area under the saddle, but you can still 3D print a dedicated case if your bike doesn't have tail storage.

The data collected comes from both the Arduino's built-in sensors and the GPS position. These allow it to monitor lean angle, fore/aft lean, yaw (though not particularly useful for a motorcycle), acceleration, lap times and even ambient temperature. . By connecting to the internet through a smartphone hotspot, the device can upload sensor data to the Arduino IoT cloud. With this service, you can display data in beautiful graphs and on a map. Since the sensor data is time-stamped, you can do things like look at the acceleration values ​​after a turn or the lean angle in a turn.