Zackary Tileston

Hard Braking Warning System

For my senior-year mechatronics technical elective, I developed this hard-braking warning system. It is a simple device that uses an accelerometer to detect when a driver is decelerating more than a preset threshold. My car insurance used a tracker that gave bonus points for good driving, so this device helps prevent my insurance premium from rising due to hard-braking events. The logic runs on an Arduino Nano and alerts the driver using a buzzer and LED. I repurposed the charger from an old Garmin device that I got from an electronics surplus store. The initial prototype had a few bugs, mostly false positives. I addressed these bugs in the software, and the sensor has worked flawlessly since then.