Hasta La Gadget!

As gadget chargers go, this one is pretty low-tech. But as it is made by Nokia, and aimed at developing countries, it is also likely that it will last forever.

The bike charger relies on the well-tested and durable bottle-dynamo to convert your pedaling into power, and the phone is held to the handlebars with a big rubber-band. In between is a box of circuitry to give a nice smooth current to any device equipped with a 2mm jack.

The charger will first be available in Kenya for around 15 euro ($18) and will go on sale worldwide by the end of this year. So how much power can our legs produce? Quite a lot, surprisingly: Pedal at 6 mph for just 10 minutes, and you’ll get almost half an hour of talk time or a stunning 37 hours of standby. The minimum speed required to charge a phone is 4 mph, or walking speed, so even a modestly jaunty commute should be enough to keep your cell going for a whole day.

We like the simplicity of Nokia’s gadget. Other solutions tend towards the complicated, with magnets or hub dynamos providing the juice. With bikes, though, simple is almost always best.

Dynamo power to recharge handsets [BBC]

See Also:

• Ugandan MacGyver Builds Own Cellphone Charger
• Reelight: Magnet Powered LED Bike Light

My friend Kiko has a problem. He has an addiction to bike polo. He also choses to ride a freewheel bike, which means that with a mallet in his hand he only has one brake. Luckily, Kiko is also a tinkerer and has his own workshop, so it was an easy job for him to come up with this ingeniously simple solution, which operates two brakes with one lever.

In bike polo, most of the time you are playing one-handed. If you ride a fixed-gear bike like many players then you can brake the rear wheel with your legs and pull the lever for the front brake with your left hand. If you ride freewheel, the usual solution is to keep the back brake so you can skid (important in polo for quick turns and looking cool). The problem is that the back brake isn’t good at actually stopping you quickly.

Kiko’s fix was to hook up two cables to a single lever, activated by the left hand. The design is incredibly simple, but does rely on some workshop skills to do it properly. After all, you really don’t want to mess up your only way of stopping, right? Here’s how to make it:

Find the hole in the brake lever where the brake cable is usually fixed into place. Drill through the opposite side with the same diameter hole and thread through an aluminum rod. This rod should be drilled with small holes for the cables to pass through, and these holes should have rounded seats for the cable-ends fashioned with a file.

The next step is to make a metal plate with three holes. The central hole is for mounting it on the lever assembly, and should be made to fit the already existing nubbin from which the cable used to protrude. The other two should be drilled, threaded and fitted with two barrel-adjusters, as seen in the photos.

Once made, you pass each cable through its own pair of holes. Pulling on the lever pulls both brakes. Best of all, you can tweak them using the barrel-adjusters to balance the brakes, adding a little more power to the back to help skidding, for example.

Does it work? Yes. Very well. If Kiko’s game last night was anything to go by, then it might be better than riding fixed. And it isn’t just for bike polo. Operating two brakes with one hand could be great for somebody with just one arm, or a stroke victim without the use of a hand.

A great DIY project, and one that is totally in the home-made spirit of bike polo.

See Also:

• The End is Nigh: Commercial Bike Polo Mallet Heads
• It Had to Happen: Bike-Polo Mallet Shafts Openly On Sale

German car-maker Volkswagen has designed a bike. Weird, right? Actually, no. The Bik.e is actually a sidekick for your car, something you are supposed to remove from the trunk when you have parked up and can go no further on four wheels.

The Bik.e is electric, and folds up to fit in the spare-wheel well in the back of your car. While sitting in the dark like a kidnap victim, the Bik.e recharges from the car’s electrical system as you drive, meaning it is always ready to go. And that’s just as well, as the Bik.e has no pedals. If you run out of juice when away from the mother-ship then you’ll be scooting back Fred Flintstone-style, or just pushing.

With a 12.5 mile range and a 12.5 mph top speed, it’ll be fine to take you from your Walmart parking space right up to the front door, while the disk-brakes and LED lights will keep you safe. VW doesn’t seem to be planning to supply the Bik.e with its own cars yet, but Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, the R&D boss at VW, told an audience at Auto China 2010 that it is committed to actually bringing it to market.

I’m all for getting people out of their cars and on to two wheels – after all, one less car on the road means one less two-ton hunk of death piloted by a cellphone-dialing driver directly at vulnerable cyclists. But I can’t imagine that this electric scooter is going to be cheap, so why not just throw a Brompton folding bike in the trunk? You might even get fit as you ride it.

Volkswagen bik.e replaces spare tire with electric mobility device [Green Autoblog via the Giz and Fast Company]

See Also:

• Gocycle Black, The Non-Electric Electric Bike
• Super Size Me! Electric Bikes for the Obese
• Video: Sanyo Eneloop Bike Pedals For You
• Electric Bikes Are Blowing Up and Gadget Lab Readies an e-Bike …

Bike My Way is a cheap and simple application that will turn your iPhone 3G or 3GS into a GPS track-logger for cyclists. It eschews the rather distracting frills of other biking or multi-purpose GPS apps for a simple, battery-saving feature-set.

The $2 app records your progress to a GPX file, allows you to add waypoint (spacial “bookmarks”) and snap photos with the iPhone’s camera to add to the route. You can add notes, and then export GPX 1.0 or 1.1 files to EveryTrail (an online route-sharing community) or via email. And that’s it.

You can see your progress as a line creeps Indiana Jones-style across a map, but most people will probably want to switch off the iPhone’s display to save batteries: Bike My Way keeps logging when your iPhone is sleeping – just don’t close the app.

If you have compatible software, you can also use the exported info to geotag photos taken with another camera, thus taking care of the most common GPS tracker needs. Sure, you can get other, better featured apps for free of a few dollars more, but perch those info-overkill HUDs on your handlebars and you end up crashing or draining your batteries in minutes.

Bike My Way [Bike My Way via Bike Hugger]

See Also:

• Dahon iPhone Bike Mount Is Waterproof, Shockproof
• Five iPhone Apps That Replace Bike Hardware
• A Heads-Up Map Display for iPhone-Using Bicyclists

This fixed/single speed mountain-bike hub from Affix has a few things to dislike: the weird, oversized pie-plate-style ring for one, and the weight (570g or 1.3-pounds) for another. But if you can get over that it could be a rather useful, if niche, piece of bike gear.

The hub’s purpose is to eliminate the need for a flip-flop hub. A flip-flop hub has threading on both sides so you can remove the wheel and quickly change gears on a single speed bike, either to use a slightly smaller or bigger fixed-gear cog, or to swap to a freewheel. The problem: it takes a minute or two, and you get dirty grease on your fingers.

Affix’s solution is to have a convertible hub. You press and twist that big ring and the hub locks or unlocks, allowing you to coast or to skid-stop on the same side. This could be handy a few ways: for bike polo (I told you it was a niche product) you could ride around on a fixed but switch to single-speed on the court (many polo players use a rear brake). Or you could put it in the mountain bike for which it is designed and just choose depending on mood.

The cog comes in 14 or 15-tooth sizes, and is splined for a slide-on fit (you still get a lock-ring, though). And here is probably the biggest practical objection: Many people choose a bigger cog on the freewheel side of a flip-flop to make hill-climbing easier. With the Affix hub, you are stuck with one gear ratio.

The aluminum, 32-hole hub comes in 120, 130 and 135mm spacings to fit any frame, and costs a rather scary $270.

MTB SS/Fixed Hub [Affix]

Affix Free and Fix Hub store [Ben’s Cycle]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Sram Torpedo Hub
• Sturmey Archer Three-Speed Fixed Gear Hub