Pingbell, tradition meets innovation with a bike bell smarter than the rest

Tradition meets innovation with a bike bell smarter than the rest. Pingbell is available for preorder on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frolicstudio/pingbell-ping-your-bell-find-your-bike

Ping your bell, find your bike

With all the amazing things that living in a bicycle-friendly city offers, trying to locate your bike in a sea of other bikes is like finding a needle in a haystack. So we wanted to tackle this problem and created Pingbell, a smart bike bell designed to help you find your bike.

We tried to raise the funds with a Kickstarter campaign, but we didn’t reach the funding we were aiming for.

# About 24h FROLIC At FROLIC studio, we write down the things that we think deserve some attention and put these in a box. When we have some white space between projects, we grab a of these problems and over the course of 24 hours, push ourselves to solve it. This means brainstorming, building a working prototype, and testing it in the field. With 24 hours to do all this, there's not much time to over-think and second-guess decisions - it forces us to let intuition take the lead. # Problem: “I can’t find my bike at the train station” If you are a cyclist in a bike-friendly city, you probably recognize the feeling of being unable to find your bike when parking in a busy place. It can be a nightmare to find your bike - even if you remember the place where you parked it, people may have moved it or it’s squished under other bikes. We used this 24h-FROLIC to come up with a way to find a bike after parking it in very bike-crowded places. # Solution: Bluetooth Bike Bell + App We hacked a bike bell so that from the outside it looks like an ordinary bell, however on the inside it’s nothing but normal. It is packed with electronics and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to connect to your iPhone. When you park your bike and walk away from it, you break the bluetooth connection to your bike and the app will automatically drop a pin on the map. This gives you the general location of your bike using GPS. With BLE you can use your phone to even more precisely locate your bike’s position. But in the insanity of these bike parking lots, this may still not be enough as you often stand right by your bike and have difficulties spotting it. This is why we added the ability to remotely ring your bell directly from the app. This makes it easy to find your bike using your ears instead of your cluttered sense of sight. More info at: www.frolicstudio.com/24hFROLIC-bell VO recorded at Arnoud Traa's studio: De Auditieve Dienst http://www.deauditievedienst.nl

Story

Pingbell was born out of our ‘24h FROLIC’ process, where we give ourselves 24 hours to solve a challenge by building a working prototype. This video shows the original prototype.