Hasta La Gadget!

Finally, after almost five months of searching (and kind of cheating by actually buying one ready-made), we’ve found a donor bike for the Gadget Lab fixed-gear conversion. It’s an old Massi Master road bike, with Italian Gara Cro-Mo steel tubing and forks. The groupset, or brakes and gears and everything else that moves, is Shimano 105 ,which has the gear-shifters built into the brake levers (that threw me at first).

As you can see, the frame is a rather lovely metallic purple color and the style of the graphics plus a little googling makes me think that the bike is from the 1980s. Judging by the comments we get on any of our bike posts, I’m sure y’all can do a much better job of identification.

The wheels have the matching Shimano hub with Wolber rims, and they look so nice that it seems a shame to swap them out. But swapped they will be, as however slick this looks as a road bike, it was bought to be sacrificed.

There’s one problem, and the eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted it already. The frame has vertical dropouts, meaning chain tension can’t be adjusted without either luck or an ugly tensioner. I will be using a half-link BMX chain, so fingers crossed — but the frame is so nice I couldn’t help but buy it.

The conversion will take place over the next few days, replacing wheels, chain, seat (it’s a nice seat, but plastic saddles in the summer are hell) and stripping off all the extra metalwear.

I need a few tips. First, the rear brake cable runs trough the top tube, entering and exiting through lugged holes. I’m keeping all the parts I strip, in case I decide to change back in the future, but this looks impossible to re-thread. What kind of voodoo is needed to do it?

Also, tips on chain-tensioners are welcome. I’m going to do my best to match up gear ratios and chain to avoid adding one, but otherwise what is the smoothest, quietest way to go?

I think everything else will be pretty easy, between a lifetime of tinkering and all the good advice the Gadget Lab readers have lent over this series of posts. First, though, I have a puncture to fix: The guy I bought it from hadn’t put enough air in the tires and I got a pinch-flat.

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Fixie Project Update: Things Are Going Slowly, But They …
• The Great Gadget Lab Fixie Project: Help Us Build a Better Bike …

HTC Touch2

(Credit: HTC)

Just yesterday, Microsoft announced that the first batch of Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphones would launch on October 6, and on Wednesday, we learned the identity of one such model: the HTC Touch2.

The Touch2 will include the new features of WM 6.5, such as …

Garmin’s cyclist-minded GPS devices have sure come a long way from their earlier, bulkier days, and it looks like the company has now produced one of its sleekest units to date in the form of its new Edge 500 GPS. Like most such devices, this one is primarily intended to track your cycling progress rather than lead you to your destination, and it promises to give you precise data on things like speed, distance, time, calories burned, and even climb and descent information, which is further bolstered by a built-in barometric altimeter to pinpoint changes in elevation. The unit can also sync up with various third-party devices that make use of ANT+ technology, and it can naturally be paired with a Garmin heart rate monitor to keep a close watch on your vitals. Look for the standalone unit to set you back about $250, while the bundle with a heart rate monitor and speed/cadence sensor bumps things up to $350.

Filed under: GPS

Garmin debuts Edge 500 GPS for bicyclists, determined unicyclists originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Considering the big fight to get augmented reality apps onto the iPhone, the concept of “Terminator-style” AR contact lenses seems little more than a pipedream, but that’s exactly the technology laid out by Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington, in Seattle–references to killer robots from the future and all.

“These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet,” writes Parviz. “But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.”

Parviz goes on to detail the possibilities of such a technology, which, he points out, even in a simple state could be rather useful,

Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Killer robots from the future rejoice.

Patients admitted to hospitals often find themselves with dozens of wires and cables strung from their every extremity — trying to roll over at night resulting in a very large, expensive cat’s cradle with the strings ending at sticky pads affixed to sensitive areas. GE is working on a solution, the Wireless Patient Monitoring System, which would accept signals from dozens of non-tethered sensors, beaming that data straight to the people who need to view it whether they be down the hall at the nurse’s station or down the road at the driving range. The company is working with the FCC to develop a vendor-neutral frequency band exclusively for such devices to communicate over, the results of which will surely become the latest impediment for whitespace wireless approval.

Filed under: Wireless

GE’s Wireless Patient Monitoring System beams your vitals at 2360MHz originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments