Hasta La Gadget!

Many of us are familiar with the idea of convergence devices. Take your smartphone for instance. It was not too long ago when the normal mobile phone could make and receive calls, in addition to just text messages. Over time, additional functions were introduced to it, ranging from it being your mobile shopping list, portable media player, personal navigation device, the works! Well, I guess it makes perfect sense if one were to be able to find new ways to make a bicycle look and function better than ever before, and this is a project by students at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland, who paraded their work at Milan Design Week 2013 as part of the art and design school’s Savoir-Faire exhibition.

Sporting a range of smart and functional bicycle accessories, what you see above is a unique idea that sees a bell which also doubles up as a brake, now how about that? Of course, there were also other ideas on show such as easy zip-tie hooks for bags and water bottles, zip-tie LED lights, a zip-tie bell, a snow chain, a cable style brake, and valve stem caps, among others. We do wonder whether this unique bicycle bell would cost more than an actual bicycle itself that is made out of recycled cardboard.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Kidswalker NT Has Your Child Piloting Their Own Drill-Equipped Mech, New York City Celebrates Earth Day With All-Electric Taxi Pilot,

One thing that’s great about IKEA furniture is that it’s so cheap that you can feel comfortable hacking it into other forms without fear of damaging your grandma’s prized antique Chippendale. Take, for example, this epic IKEA hack, which transformed a couple of ordinary stools into a functional kid’s bicycle.

With the help of FabShop, Samuel Bernier and Andreas Bhend took parts from a couple of $15 FROSTA birch plywood stools, along with a handful of 3D printed parts, and fabricated a bicycle out of them. While using some 3D printed parts might be looked at as “cheating” by some, I think it just gave their design a minor boost, and the bike still captures the spirit of the original furniture upon which it’s based.

Bernier and Bhend get bonus points for creating a fake IKEA instruction manual to go with their design too. They called the bike the “Draisienne“, named after an antique bicycle, but I would have gone with more of an IKEA friendly name like “BIKKLO” or “KICKLA.”

If you’re interested in building your own IKEA bike, head on over to Instructables for the build details.

[via FastCo Design via Cheezburger]

A Brooklynite named Matt Richardson has built a working prototype of a bicycle headlight that uses a Raspberry Pi to project his current traveling speed as he rides around the city. Richardson calls it the Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight, and it’s one of those jaw-dropping DIY projects that makes you wonder why this isn’t something you can buy in a store yet.

The prototype has a small projector mounted to the handlebars of the bicycle, which is connected to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI cable. The projector and the Raspberry Pi are both powered by a USB battery pack. The Raspberry Pi and the battery pack seem to be crudely glued to a triangular piece of wood that is strapped onto the center of the bike, but Richardson says in his video that he’s hoping that future prototypes will combine all the components into one single piece that will be mounted onto the handlebars.

The Dynamic Headlight for now only projects the speed of the bike, but Richardson is looking to add all sorts of interesting functions to future iterations like GPS and other “animations and visualizations”. He’s also planning on writing about it for MAKE and including instructions for those that are brave enough to build one for themselves.

Someone needs to get him some of that Veronica Mars Kickstarter money, stat.

For those of you who love mountain biking, perhaps you love the well tarred roads that are smooth as a baby’s bottom, and we also know of the excitement in riding down a mountain trail. But what about those stretches of loose snow or sand? Such terrain is not exactly the most conducive for riding, even with the large 2.75-inch tires, as they seem to have a tendency to sink in and get all bogged down. Which could be why California-based Pedego has rolled out an electric fatbike that they call the Trail Tracker.

The Trail Tracker will be different from the pedelecs which rely on electrical power in order to augment the rider’s pedal strokes, as this is entirely an e-bike, where you can choose to pedal without any help from its battery reserve, or to run it via motor power alone. The 48-volt 10Ah lithium-ion battery will be able to send you rolling down at 20 mph, retailing for $2,975 a pop.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: 2014 Chevrolet Impala Gets Valet Mode, Voyager Smartphone Prefers To Remain In The Car,

In Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the eponymous character spends most of the film on a quest to recover his beloved bicycle. But say you already have a spiffy-looking Schwinn Phantom cruiser like Pee-Wee? Don’t you need an outfit to go with it? Sure you do.

Since you probably don’t want to get your actual suit and bow tie all muddy, you might want to pick up one of these Pee-Wee Herman-inspired skinsuits from Podium for $149.99(USD). Unlike Pee-Wee’s suit, this one is made from stretchy MITI Lycra Shield endurance fabric, with a durably YKK zipper and MAB Powerband leg grippers to keep them in place as you hit top speeds on your trusty two-wheeled steed.

[via Boing Boing]