Because the vast majority of ESP32 projects (and R-Pi for that matter) that get posted on here are for basic IoT things that don't need anywhere near the capabilities of an ESP32.
The E-bike rental business will be significantly more profitable with these. Automated delivery to your location when you rent, automated return when you're done. No more paying staff to collect bikes and return them to high-traffic areas, and probably fewer bikes lost overall.
This doesn't appear to have any sensor that could possibly allow it to participate in traffic. So in terms of auto-car driving level it's probably around the "brick on the accelerator" stage.
Edit: upon a closer look I retract my previous comment and claim the opposite :)
The video’s chat comments are pretty funny, similar to twitch chat.
He’s explaining the planning, basic physics, and build process. Some of the comments were like: “I took a course on this but still lost”
At 5:00, he’s explaining the AI processing part and made a comment of how this part is “comparatively simple” and the whole chat repeats this (sarcastically). Then most of the people say how they’re lost and how this guy is a boss
One thing I noticed in Chinese cities is that they often had a cleaner assigned to each block. They would have a blue jumpsuit, broom, shovel, and wheelie bin.
You're not being downvoted for the spelling error.
You just made a politically charged accusation against the HN community for focusing more on the high-schooler-created-a-self-driving-bicycle than the github-repo-happened-to-be-in-chinese part of a post.
This is a legitimately cool project regardless of the origin of its creator and the language they speak.
it's not a cool project if you are not able to understand it. There are probably Chinese hacker news or something similar and there would be a perfect place for this cool post.
Why doesn't hacker news have content in other languages? Is that because those contents are not cool or that people respect the expectation that everything here is in a common language that everyone can understand?
Within it you can see this guy's neat-o bicycle balancing itself, driving along the road, and avoiding obstacles.
The page is also quite readable if you use Chrome's auto-translate feature.
In any event, I'm not saying you don't have a point. Maybe posting the translated version would have been a better choice. However, you made your point in an obnoxious way that instantly alienated yourself from potential readers.
If votes on hacker news are important to you (and they seem to be), then you should take this as a lesson on how to improve your approach to discussing topics without losing your audience.
No I don't care about votes, I don't even downvote ever, and rarely upvote tbh. It's just an interesting thing to observe.
I've just seeked to the end of the video and agree that it is really cool.
It's just there are so many cool things to check out on HN that are often not in my field of expertise which makes them hard enough to parse, and then there is this post that is in a completely different language with a non descriptive title.
FWIW, I use HN to stay connected with and watch people innovate and problem solve. You don't need to know Chinese to watch the video or peruse the code/fusion360 files.
The readme is parsed easily with google translate:
>Inside Hardware is the PCB file of the controller, which is based on ESP32, equipped with MPU6050, and connects the driver through CAN bus.
>Structure is the body structure design file. The step is exported by Fusion. There may be some bugs. It is recommended to download the Fusion360 project directly and open it in the software: https://a360.co/2TOtZRd
Edit: Some of the comments in the code seem to be Chinese/unparsable.
so because it's not a rule then we should post things in non-English? If you honestly believe so then do that.
People asked me why didn't I focus on the actual project instead of the language, yet they focus on the tone of my comment and not the actual point I'm trying to make.
Post in other languages, and voting will take care of whether people are fine with that or not. Translation tools are good enough that this is not a big problem.
No, it's like saying that the measure of whether or not something belongs on HN is whether or not people vote it up. That this article has done as well as it has is all the proof that is necessary that it belongs here.
Consider that, combined with the fact your first comment upstream was flagged, as a pretty strong indicator of what HN thinks about this, though your use of "woke" probably did not help matters either.
I don't see how this is a woke issue. People understood the video just fine using machine translation. If people can understand it and find it interesting they upvote, otherwise they don't, people can understand and everything is working as intended.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you have a legit question there is no need to drench it in flamebait. Moreover the guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with such questions.
Wow, that’s utterly mind blowing that this was done by a single person. You have to see the video, even if you don’t understand Chinese: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1fV411x72a
Aside from some help he got from a friend to fabricate the metal parts (he gave up on 3D printing since it was too fragile), it seems he did everything else himself. A very impressive project.
I’d be happy to help interpret a bit what is going on in the video or the project itself. Short story is that it is, by all appearances, a self-propelled bike which uses a central gyro wheel for stabilization and a rear driving wheel for motion. It has an RGBD camera mounted at the front for obstacle sensing, an ESP32 for real-time control using ROS, and a Huawei DaVinci processor running Linux for the sensing with some unspecified computer vision bits. It looks like he custom-designed the PCB to integrate these two processors.
Edited: misunderstood the last bit. He’s not a high school student, but he is a recent university graduate (finished undergrad in 2018).
I don't think that it properly 'self navigates'. It seems to more just be a 'go forward without crashing into stuff' sort of algorithm. If you presented it with a dead end or a traffic cone or something like that, it would probably completely freak out and start oscillating. The navigation seems to be very rudimentary, but props to the creator because it's very good at staying upright.
Also I am curious how one modifies a PID controller to keep the RPM of the reaction wheel low. With a standard PID controller you would eventually exceed Max RPM, wouldn't you
the reaction wheel works because of the large moment of inertia of the wheel. when the bike begins to tip over, it applies a torque to the wheel. you can imagine trying to get that wheel turning with your hands, it would offer a lot of resistance at first before getting up to speed. the bike is applying torque against that resistance and this moves the bike. this means that, if the moment of the wheel is large enough, and the correction small enough, you could make a correction without even spinning the wheel very much at all.
when the bike is making a correction, it can overshoot and then stop the wheel suddenly, which would ultimately result in the bike becoming perfectly upright and the wheel not accumulating any speed from one correction to the next.
if the momentum of the correction you need to make is greater than the momentum of the wheel spinning at max RPM, then the bike will fall over. this means that the system will fail if the bike is pushed too hard, becomes too off-balance or if there is something heavy, like a person, on top of it. with a wheel that was heavy enough, and a motor strong enough, the bike would be able to make itself upright from laying on the ground or keep itself upright with a person and cargo on top.
You change the target lean angle based on RPM. Let's say there's a side wind from the right, the wheel keeps spinning faster, so it'll set the desired lean further to the right until the RPM starts dropping.
Wow, the bike standing there and seemingly not doing any motion to stabilize itself (like a human rider would) is quite interersting. I guess its still doing micro-movements, but they are not captured by the camera.
What I'm wondering a little bit is how stability would be, given the thingy is rather light without a rider. Bikes definitely gain stability from weight - and the rider adds the biggest amount of that.
Sure! But what I meant is that a human rider doing a trackstand will do a far bigger amount of motions. There's always some steering and rocking back and forth involved. See for example https://youtu.be/I6ABRLHLiTg?t=139
The bike towards the end of the video looks different from the one in the beginning. Perhaps somebody who understand Chinese could clarify this for me?
He was inspired by a bike developed at Tsinghua university. The second bike shown is that one. (Chrome on Android did a reasonable job translating the subtitles almost as soon as they appeared)
Self-driving bicycles (for last-mile deliveries) can be _much less precise_ than cars: 10mph is slow enough for both parties to have a lot of time to react, and if 50lbs of bicycle going at 10mph hits a pedestrian (god forbid) the impact might not even knock you down.
Now integrate that into all the e-roller rentals, and have them drive back by themselves to their parking and loading points. No more 'juicers' necessary!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadWhy is it creative?
Edit: upon a closer look I retract my previous comment and claim the opposite :)
He’s explaining the planning, basic physics, and build process. Some of the comments were like: “I took a course on this but still lost”
At 5:00, he’s explaining the AI processing part and made a comment of how this part is “comparatively simple” and the whole chat repeats this (sarcastically). Then most of the people say how they’re lost and how this guy is a boss
Pretty fun video to watch overall.
Everyone else, if you can't read Chinese and want to turn the distracting comments off, it's the switch below the video labelled "弹".
PS. Not sure what city this was filmed in, visible number plates are Shanghai and Yunnan, but he mentions Tsinghua (Beijing).
In the big cities, streets were very clean.
Edit: I lie. some of the code.
I think it's more like three woke.
You just made a politically charged accusation against the HN community for focusing more on the high-schooler-created-a-self-driving-bicycle than the github-repo-happened-to-be-in-chinese part of a post.
This is a legitimately cool project regardless of the origin of its creator and the language they speak.
Why doesn't hacker news have content in other languages? Is that because those contents are not cool or that people respect the expectation that everything here is in a common language that everyone can understand?
Within it you can see this guy's neat-o bicycle balancing itself, driving along the road, and avoiding obstacles.
The page is also quite readable if you use Chrome's auto-translate feature.
In any event, I'm not saying you don't have a point. Maybe posting the translated version would have been a better choice. However, you made your point in an obnoxious way that instantly alienated yourself from potential readers.
If votes on hacker news are important to you (and they seem to be), then you should take this as a lesson on how to improve your approach to discussing topics without losing your audience.
I've just seeked to the end of the video and agree that it is really cool.
It's just there are so many cool things to check out on HN that are often not in my field of expertise which makes them hard enough to parse, and then there is this post that is in a completely different language with a non descriptive title.
The readme is parsed easily with google translate:
>Inside Hardware is the PCB file of the controller, which is based on ESP32, equipped with MPU6050, and connects the driver through CAN bus.
>Structure is the body structure design file. The step is exported by Fusion. There may be some bugs. It is recommended to download the Fusion360 project directly and open it in the software: https://a360.co/2TOtZRd
Edit: Some of the comments in the code seem to be Chinese/unparsable.
Turns out it doesn't say that content has to be or even should be in english.
But it does have a few things to say about the kind of comment you've left.
People asked me why didn't I focus on the actual project instead of the language, yet they focus on the tone of my comment and not the actual point I'm trying to make.
Consider that, combined with the fact your first comment upstream was flagged, as a pretty strong indicator of what HN thinks about this, though your use of "woke" probably did not help matters either.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Aside from some help he got from a friend to fabricate the metal parts (he gave up on 3D printing since it was too fragile), it seems he did everything else himself. A very impressive project.
I’d be happy to help interpret a bit what is going on in the video or the project itself. Short story is that it is, by all appearances, a self-propelled bike which uses a central gyro wheel for stabilization and a rear driving wheel for motion. It has an RGBD camera mounted at the front for obstacle sensing, an ESP32 for real-time control using ROS, and a Huawei DaVinci processor running Linux for the sensing with some unspecified computer vision bits. It looks like he custom-designed the PCB to integrate these two processors.
Edited: misunderstood the last bit. He’s not a high school student, but he is a recent university graduate (finished undergrad in 2018).
I have to say though... the streaming comments overlaid on the video player in BiliBili is beyond annoying.
when the bike is making a correction, it can overshoot and then stop the wheel suddenly, which would ultimately result in the bike becoming perfectly upright and the wheel not accumulating any speed from one correction to the next.
if the momentum of the correction you need to make is greater than the momentum of the wheel spinning at max RPM, then the bike will fall over. this means that the system will fail if the bike is pushed too hard, becomes too off-balance or if there is something heavy, like a person, on top of it. with a wheel that was heavy enough, and a motor strong enough, the bike would be able to make itself upright from laying on the ground or keep itself upright with a person and cargo on top.
What I'm wondering a little bit is how stability would be, given the thingy is rather light without a rider. Bikes definitely gain stability from weight - and the rider adds the biggest amount of that.
At first, I wondered where a "self-riding, riderless bike" would go, and what it would do when it got there.