The company says although a passenger can put up with whole-body vibration for 2.5 hours when seated upright, studies show they’ll deal with the same motion for only five minutes when lying down. The solution is what Cabin lured us into the van to experience: individual beds on active suspensions. The company calls it the Cabin Cloud.
“We have a set of sensors that are measuring the acceleration of the vehicle, and also the bed, to compute in real time what we should be cancelling out,” Currier says. He believes two accelerometers per bed (which measure up and down movement rather than the bus peeling away from traffic lights) will be enough.
Cabin worked with off-the-shelf components, using a cheap Raspberry Pi computer and the electric motor from a hoverboard to move the bed up and down quickly enough in the opposite direction to cancel out the potholes. Bus goes up, bed goes down, to actually stay level. And vice versa. Without gearing or linkages, the motor moves the bed up to 1,000 times a second. Currier describes it as noise-canceling headphones but for bumps.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!