Hello all,

For some time now, beside other things, I have been working with pressure sensors on the steering wheel. I mounted four of them to the perimeter of the wheel. They are connected to an amplifier board. The signal is then fed to a Texas Instruments eZ430-RF2500 board, which serves as an AD converter and a wireless transmitter. Very interesting thing if you are amazed by small electronic devices, like me. The following figure shows the setup:

The data is collected and recorded at a remote computer. I combined the data from the sensor with the data from the simulator, and visualized it in Matlab. It is shown in the following video. The wheel is displayed in yellow where no pressure is detected. It gradually turns to gray and black depending on the amount and location of pressure. First, the wheel is squeezed multiple times in a clock-wise manner without driving. Second, a city scenario is driven, while the hands are fixed at around 10 and 2 o’clock. It can be noticed that the brightness is changing depending on the amount of pressure on a certain segment.

Now, that the sensor system is completed, it can be used in a number of ways: to trigger a Push-To-Talk signal or to collect tapping patterns and map different taps to certain commands. For example two taps on the left-upper sensor could activate the left index light or lights and siren, etc. It has may possibilities. If you have a good idea, what else it can be used for, please let me know by leaving a comment. Thanks.

On another topic, I recently rediscovered Matlab’s possibility to record .avi videos. It can be a handy tool if you want to present results over time and with more than one space dimension. Just type ‘avifile’ in Matlab Help, the usage is self explanatory from the example.

Cheers,

Oszkar Palinko

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