Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday we brought you a gallery of home-modded bikes and asked you if you knew of anything crazier. The post was so popular, and we got so many great suggestions, that we decided to go again. The only disappointing part? Of the mountain of suggestions as to the true nature of the "Pizza Bike", none were plausible, despite being very funny. One more thing — far too many of you suggested that it might be a condom carrier. What’s wrong with you guys?

Photo Credit: TheThompsonFive/Flickr

Pub Bike

One of the reasons I ride a bike is so that I can roll back from the pub and not lose my drivers license (although in Germany, oddly, you can lose your car license for being drunk in charge of a bike).

This monster takes it slightly further, putting the pub on the bike. The PedalPub holds 16 people, although only ten of them have to pedal while the others relax. The original is Dutch, but we picked up on the Minnesota version as it was pointed out to us in the comments and also because it highlights an interesting Minnesota law.

According to the PedalPub site, Minnesota State law was amended to allow passengers to drink while pedaling. Here’s the exception:

a vehicle that is operated for commercial purposes in a manner similar to a bicycle as defined in section 169.01, subdivision 51, with five or more passengers who provide pedal power to the drive train of the vehicle

Product page [PedalPub] 

The Poppa Chop

Far too dangerous looking to be practical, the Popa Chop is a chopper built to wheelie. Made by Gadget Lab reader Macbaen, the bike balances on the back wheels of two kids’ cycles. As you can imagine, its almost impossible to steer. In fact, it ended up "attracted to the tree across the street".

Poppa Chop [Macbaenchunk]

The Schloooong Bike

This ridiculous example of bike hacking is brought to you by the Rat Patrol. It’s classed as a Limo Bike, but lacks any frills. The stretch-cycle is, as you’d expect, dangerous — under the listing for Most Memorable Ride we find the following: "Ones where critical bits didn’t fall off!"

Sadly, the Schlooooong Bike is out of action — it was actually stolen, presumably by someone with a sense of humor.

Schlooooong Bike [Rat Patrol]

The Aquaduct

Not a homemade mod, but fantastic nonetheless. The Aquaduct is designed for developing countries where water is both far away and dirty. You cycle the empty bike to the well or river, load it up and, on the return journey the water is pumped by pedal-power through a carbon filter and ends up in the top tank.

The design is still a concept (we first covered it a year ago, but if there’s anything we know about the developing world is that the people are very inventive hardware hackers. Hopefully somebody will build their own.

Aquaduct blog [Aquaduct]

Water Bike Pitches Pedal Powered Purification [Gadget Lab]

Sport Utility Bicycle

Here’s another ute, this time fashioned from two bike frames and one shopping cart. Don’t overload it, though. The maker, called TheThompsonFive, tells us how it rides:

Yeah it’s heavy, but it rides pretty good. The only problem I’m having is that the basket has quite a bit of flex in it, which is a little unsettling going around bumpy turns. I may have to work out some cross bracing. I wonder if they will let me take it into the supermarket.

Photo credit: TheThompsonFive/Flickr

Like many people, Jaya Kumar wanted an e-book reader that was a little more capable than Amazon.com’s Kindle. So he built one.

Kumar’s custom-built e-book reader has a fully capable web browser — it can even handle Google Maps — and the same "electronic ink" display used by the Kindle and the Sony Reader.

"It offers an opportunity to get involved with a disruptive technology
that is at
the tipping point of having a huge impact in the real world," says
Kumar, an embedded Linux developer who lives in Malaysia. "It is also
exciting to be using something that’s cutting-edge but
accessible in an open way so that a hobbyist can take the kit
and manipulate it."

Kumar is one of a community of developers building e-book readers using prototype kits from E Ink, whose paperlike displays power both Amazon’s and Sony’s e-book readers. E Ink’s kits allow do-it-yourself
hackers and engineers to create their own applications and products.

It may not be as pretty as
the neatly packaged Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader. And at a whopping $3,000, the E Ink kit isn’t going to threaten Amazon’s market share (the Kindle 2 costs $350). But for the Lego-minded, the kits can offer an experience that pre-packaged e-readers will find difficult to beat.

E Ink launched the prototype kits about eight months ago targeted at product designers and hobbyists who want hands-on access to its display technology. The company’s lower power, sunlight-readable, thin displays already power the Kindle and Sony Reader.

The prototype kit offers buyers a production sample of a glass-based display, a display controller and all the hardware and software necessary to produce a
fully functional e-reader. The kit supports 5", 6", 8" and 9.7"
displays.

"The primary advantage is you can take it apart and look at each
individual piece, like a block diagram," says Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing for E Ink. "You can do your own design and put together your own device or applications based on our technology."

For e-book enthusiasts, it offers what a Kindle or a Sony Reader can’t. "If
you buy one of those units you won’t be won’t be able to reprogram it to your
satisfaction," he says. "You can’t copy the electronics or change the chipset or use a different software."

The kit is based around the open source Gumstix single-board computer, which combines a 400-MHz Marvell processor
with a Bluetooth transceiver, USB, a serial port and a card reader. (In contrast, the Kindle 2 has a 532-MHz processor and no ports, but does include a built-in wireless access card.) The board comes installed with Linux. E Ink also offers software display drivers that are open source  and sample applications to help developers and hobbyists get started.

The prototype kits are pre-configured to operate as a simple e-book reader. So out of the box, users can download page images from their PC to the included multimedia card and view them on the display with no further programming or assembly.

But the ability to hack and tweak has made it a dream gadget for developers like Kumar.  Kumar has written several drivers for the kit that would make typical Linux applications run transparently on it. "It’s more than just an e-book reader then," says Kumar.

Kumar’s programming efforts allow Fennec, an Mozilla Firefox web browser for mobile phones and smaller non-PC devices, to run on the kit. (See video here.) Kumar can even have Google maps on his e-reader.

So far most of the applications are Linux-based, but there are users trying to run Windows CE and other operating systems on the kits, says E Ink’s Peruvemba.

Earlier this month, product development firm Moto Development Group showed off the first E Ink display powered by the Google Android operating system. (See video here)

The community of DIYers keep the buzz alive on the prototype kits but companies also use them to create new products.

"A number of people are building the next-generation browsing device, tablet PC or handheld," says Peruvemba. "Those devices could run our display and companies want to experiment with it."

Photo: E Ink Prototype Kit Runs Wired Blog/Jaya Kumar

What’s the first thing you do after buying a new computer? Apart from a good few fingers of scotch to dull the pain of your dwindling bank account? For me, the first online purchase with a new Mac is RAM, and after picking up a shiny new unabomber MacBook I made the traditional trip to Crucial.com, memory suppliers to the smart and beautiful.

And I mean traditional. One of the "features" of the Mac is that the memory comes in matched pairs. This means that it takes up both slots, and therefore bumping up from 2GB to 4GB means buying a pair of 2GB sticks and throwing out the old ones. I have a box somewhere around here full of useless RAM. Can’t use it, can’t sell it. Maybe I’ll make a nerd-necklace for the Lady.

The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are designed to be easy to open and operate upon. Pop open the battery hatch and you can simply tug the hard drive out — a huge improvement on the old MacBook Pro — changing a drive on that thing was like playing a particularly tricky game of Operation.

But oddly, adding more RAM is actually harder on the new MacBook than on the old white plastic one. Not much harder, but certainly a lot scarier. Read on to find out why. Warning: Lots of pictures

In the old MacBook, the RAM slots were reached through a hatch in the battery compartment. You undid a few captive screws and pulled out the L-shaped cover. Once there, you flipped a couple of levers and out popped the RAM, ready to be replaced. Total time taken, five minutes. Experience level needed — n00b.

With the new aluminum MacBooks, there is a little more work. First, flip the little lever to remove the battery cover:

The battery pulls out by the little plastic tab, just like the hard drive. Go ahead and remove the battery. Then the work begins. You’ll need a small Philips screwdriver to take out a total of eight screws, three long and five short. Check the data sheet and diagram and print it before shutting down the computer. Or just look in the instruction manual that came with the Mac. Or, failing both of these, do what I did and pull it up on another device:

And we’re in! See what I said about being scary? The machine is barely two days old and already it’s opened up on the slab. I don’t have a problem with this (I once took a hot air gun to the inside of an iBook to reflow solder on a dry joint) but for the average user this is probably a little too much. But then, I guess that’s what the Genius Bar is for.

Next up, the RAM. I always use Crucial. The prices are good, the online selector means I always buy the right sticks and the stuff turns up fast. This order was placed on Wednesday afternoon and arrived this morning, and that’s slower than usual.

I bought 2x2GB of DDR3 memory, running at 1067 MHz, to give me a total of 4GB, the maximum allowed in the MacBook. The price was OK, at €56 (about $70) plus taxes and shipping. All in, €73.07 ($92.05). Certainly not the least I have paid, but then Apple always wants us to put the good stuff in our machines. Actually, buying the extra memory from Apple would cost $150, double the price, and much less fun.

Here it is, freed from its anti-static bag. The new stuff is at the top, with twice as many chips. I guess that’s better.

The instructions for memory removal say to flip a lever, but in my Mac you just pull a plastic retainer to the side and the memory springs up.

Then you take out the second one and pop in the new sticks. Pretty simple, and almost no pressure required. Then the back plate goes back on. Make sure you don’t let the tiny screws stick to your arm and then drop onto a cowhide rug like the one in this room. Just saying, is all. Before it goes back on, here’s a quick look at the bottom plate:

It’s every bit as solid as the rest of the machine. After screwing the plate back in place and replacing the battery and hatch cover, its time to see if we broke anything. Hopefully it will go well, as I pulled of some rather important stickers from one of the sticks:

Oops. Let’s switch it on and see:

It lives! Fantastic. Now to see if it’s working properly. Here’s a before and after of the About This Mac panel.

All working fine, although the Startup Disk section seems to have gone missing. The disk is still there – I saw it – so I’m not too worried. Total time, including going to buy a new set of tiny screwdrivers and digging the lost screws out of the rug, was around 20 minutes. You could do it quicker by not taking so many photographs.

Does it feel faster? Yes. Lightroom, where I processed the images you see here, screams along now. Flipping between library and develop modules, for instance, feels faster than my old MacBook Pro. €70 well spent, I’d say.

See Also:

• Hands On: Old MacBook Pro vs New MacBook
• How Not to Fix a MacBook Keyboard
• PowerBook Teardown. What Gadget Labbers Do at Lunchtime

The tilt sensors or the accelerometers on the HTC Android G1 phone aren’t just for playing Super Monkey Ball. A team of do-it-yourself drone enthusiasts are channeling it to remotely control and access live video feeds from a robotic blimp.

"I am a techie and this is techie heaven," says Howard Gordon, founder of Surveyor, a company that makes robotic microcontrollers. "My interest was in creating a 3D vision development platform and this is a really good tool for that."

For hobbyists, the Android-controlled robotic blimp is a relatively inexpensive fun project. With a fairly easy guide, replicating this blimp costs under $600. "Everything we have done with the robotic blimp is open source,"
says Gordon. "We have the details right from where you can get the
blimp to how you can get the code on your G1 phone."

The first step involved getting a 66-inch helium blimp kit, which is available for for under $300.The blimp was modified to add an ultrasonic ranging module a Wi-Fi antenna, a compass and a camera module called the SRV-1 Blackfin camera that Surveyor makes.

Then there’s the Android app available for download through a Google code site that once installed can be used to control the blimp. To install it on the G1, Gordon and his team used the developer kit environment.

The accelerometers of the G1 control the motion of the blimp. "Those are our primary control signals and can also use the scrollball to tilt it." The app also has buttons to control the thrust vector of the blimp’s propellers adjusting it to say a 45 degrees angle.

The robotic blimp project took nearly a year. But the detailed
documentation of the project makes it much easier for others to
attempt it, says Gordon.

Check out the awesome video demonstrating the G1 controlled robotic blimp:

More pictures

Photos: Howard Gordon

Quick, guys! It’s Valentine’s Day! If you spent all week bringing home the cheddar and completely glossed over the need to buy flowers / chocolates / new cars / diamonds / Neil Diamond records, we’ve found just the thing to save your Saturday (and beyond). These DIY Screw-Nut rings aren’t the most elaborate things in the world, but given that they’ll be hand crafted by you, they pack an extraordinary amount of “aww” power. They’re actually a spinoff of a more classy iteration, which saw the designer use 24-karat gold wedding bands and then add on the screw head and nut. We’ve heard that titanium and stainless steel will cut it if you’re on a tight budget, but regardless of the chemical makeup, “it’s the thought that counts.”

Read – Original project
Read – Cheaper method

Filed under: Wearables

DIY Screw-Nut rings replace roses, express affection originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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