Hasta La Gadget!

So Philliebot was a fail, but this chainless bicycle serves as proof that UPenn doesn’t always come up short. The Alpha Bike, designed by a group of engineering students, contains an entirely internal drivetrain that allows riders to switch between fixed-gear and multi-gear setups. The simple switch is enabled by an electronically controlled clutch, part of the Switchable Integrated Free-Fixed Transmission (SWIFT), discreetly hidden in the bike’s frame. Populating the front hub are a drum brake and a dynamo, which juices the bike’s electronics — the back hub contains a three-speed gear set, put in motion by a simple push-pull cable. When the front wheel starts rolling, an LED screen mounted in the carbon fiber handlebars is illuminated, displaying time, cadence, and speed, among other things — this data and more is stored on an accessible SD card. As of now, the bike is still a prototype, but if you start saving now, you might actually have enough scratch to buy one when it comes to fruition.

Alpha Bike concept: free-wheeling fixie for flip-floppers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve peered back in time to the early days of the universe, just following the Big Bang, and unraveled the mysteries of the human genome — yet we don’t really know how a moving bicycle manages to stay upright without a meatbag manning the handlebars. Scientists have long thought that it had something to do with the gyroscopic effect created by the spinning wheels and the caster effect of having the front wheel trail the steering axis (don’t worry, it’s all explained in a video at the source link). Researchers at Cornell, however, have created a tiny bike that generates neither of those effects yet, thanks to carefully calibrated mass distribution, still stays vertical when moving over 5MPH. The insights learned here could lead to self-stabilizing rides for us and cooler wheels for our pedal-happy automatons to inherit. PR after the break.

Continue reading Scientists unlock the secrets of bike stability, make riders optional

Scientists unlock the secrets of bike stability, make riders optional originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, so you’ll probably still look like a circus bear on a penny-farthing when you hop on the YikeBike, but with the introduction of the new extender battery backpack, you won’t have to stop every six miles to juice up. You heard right, this otherwise inconspicuous knapsack is actually packing a second YikeBike battery, which can be hooked up directly to the collapsible bicycle to keep you riding for another six miles — and if you like riding high on a tiny bike for long distances, it’s got room for more than one. So go crazy, pack this thing full of batteries and hit the road, but if your keister starts smartin’, don’t say we didn’t warn you. You can get your YikeBike juice on for $229 at the source link below.

YikeBike extender battery backpack keeps you riding in, um, style for six more miles originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading iBike Dash turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a cycling computer

iBike Dash turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a cycling computer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We came, we saw, we took pictures. A London-based startup by the name of Agility today unveiled its first and only product, the Saietta electric sports bike, and we just had to pop out to the MCN Motorcycle Show in its hometown to peep it for ourselves. Well, what is there to say that the pictures don’t already? We should probably start off with that massive hump you see up front. At first glance it makes the bike look extremely front-heavy, but it is in actual fact mostly a shell — made of a lightweight composite material whose ingredients we were not allowed to know — which channels air into the areas that need cooling and, more importantly, optimizes the hell out of this two-wheeler’s aerodynamics. There’s an exposed double wishbone suspension system, just some of the eye candy on this extremely reflective racer, and the weight balance is, contrary to our first impression, almost perfectly even. This is due to the battery packs being stashed in the center, just in front of a brushed DC motor with 90+ percent efficiency (Agility tells us the whole roaring machine has an 83 percent throughput efficiency).

There will be a choice of body panels, we saw a highly reflective chrome one, but a tamer red version is also available. Speaking of colors, the tiny speedometer lights up in a snazzy blue for night riding. We were looking at only the company’s third production prototype, but pre-orders are already being taken — at prices of just under £10,000 for the S model with a 50-mile range and just under £14,000 for the R variant that has a twin battery pack and, correspondingly, can stretch out to 100 miles — for an April delivery. US pricing is said to feature a “slight” premium, but Agility hopes it may be able to build some of these Saietta bikes over on the West Coast, potentially cutting into the expense of selling them in North America. The only thing our pictures don’t reveal is how a bike with instant torque and a four-second 0-60 acceleration (on the lighter S model, the R does it in five) feels like, but if we’re really good over the next few weeks, we might just get a chance to ride one and find out for ourselves.

Agility Saietta electric sports bike eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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