The project's objective is to construct a dashboard for an electric tricycle at my coop. This project spawned when a broken tricycle was found and it was first converted to be electric using a powerful DC motor from amazon and a 3D printed gear box all powered by a makita drill battery for ease of charging. At this time there was no way to read the speed of the tricycle and track its mileage so an arduino was used to solve this problem.
A significant portion of the hardware was designed around the Arduino platform. The main components to be connected were a TFT LCD screen, a hall effect sensor to read speed, an addressable RGB LED strip as a rev meter, a button for power on, a relay for the low voltage systems to toggle power to the motor, a potentiometer input to measure the amount of acceleration requested, a speaker to act as a horn with easily changable sound files, an SD card slot to store the sound files and an input to read the battery voltage.
The due to the number of interconnected devices, I had to use 2 arduinos connected to each other to have enough pins and allow for future expandability. I chose to use an arduino uno for the main screen and a nano for everything else. The nano handled all the processing for the bike while the uno managed the graphics rendering for the screen. A serial messaging system was established between the two arduinos using structures.
The entire project was housed inside a large 3D printed dashboard which an embedded acrylic diffuser for the LEDs.