Cycling can be fun, not to mention great exercise, but is also dangerous at times. In order to facilitate safety and harmony between road users on his hour-plus bike commute in Marseille, France, Maltek created his own LED backpack signaling setup.

The device uses a hand mounted Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense to record movement via its onboard IMU and runs a TinyML gesture recognition model to translate this into actual road signals. Left and right rotations of the wrist are passed along to the backpack unit over BLE, which shows the corresponding turn signal on its LED panel.

Other gestures include a back twist for stop, forward twist to say “merci,” and it displays a default green forward scrolling arrow as the default state.

More details on the project can be found in Maltek’s write-up here.