Arduino + Geometry + Bicycle = Speedometer

It is pretty easy to go to a big box store and get a digital speedometer for your bike. Not only is that no fun, but the little digital display isn’t going to win you any hacker cred. [AlexGyver] has the answer. Using an Arduino and a servo he built a classic needle speedometer for his bike. It also has a digital display and uses a hall effect sensor to pick up the wheel speed. You can see a video of the project below.

[Alex] talks about the geometry involved, in case your high school math is well into your …read more

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3D Printed Bicycle From Stainless Steel!

You wouldn’t 3D print a car, would you? That’d simply be impractical. However, if you’re a team of students attending the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, you might be inclined to 3D print a stainless steel bicycle instead.

The TU Delft team collaborated with MX3D, a company that uses an articulated industrial robot arm with a welder for an effector, welding and building the Arc Bicycle, glob by molten glob. Printed in chunks, this process allows the practical construction of larger objects that are able to withstand the stresses and forces of everyday use. Weighing around …read more

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Barely-There GSM GPS Tracker

What’s the most un-intrusive GPS you’ve ever seen? How about for a bike? Redditor [Fyodel] has built a Teensy-based GPS/GSM tracker that slides into your bike’s handlebars and really is out of sight.

The tracker operates on T-Mobile’s 2G service band — which will enable the device to work until about 2020 — since AT/T is phasing out their service come January. Since each positioning message averages 60 bytes, an IoT data plan is sufficient for moderate usage, with plans to switch over to a narrow-band LTE service when it becomes more affordable. [Fyodel] admits that battery life isn’t ideal …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Electric Bike And A Dashboard

Over the last few years, powerful brushless motors have become very cheap, batteries have become very powerful, and the world of quadcopters has brought us very capable electronic speed controls. Sounds like the perfect storm for a bunch of electric bike hacks, right? That’s what [bosko] is doing for his Hackaday Prize Entry. He’s building an e-bike with a big motor and an electronic dashboard, because a simple throttle switch would never do.

There are two parts to [bosko]’s bike, with the front brain box consisting of GPS, an OLED display, analog throttle, and a few wireless modules to connect …read more

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Bicycle Seismograph Measures The Streets

Riding the streets of the Netherlands on a bicycle is a silky-smooth experience compared to doing the same on those of Germany. So says [Kati Hyyppä], who made the move with her trusty Dutch bike. The experience led her to record the uneven cobblestones and broken asphalt of the German roads on a home-made seismograph, a paper chart recorder driven by the bike’s motion and recorded upon by a pen free to vibrate as it passed over any bumps.

The resulting instrument is a wooden frame with a ballpoint pen mounted in a sliding holder weighted with some washers and …read more

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Cyclist’s LED Pixel Clock Has No Fat Around The Middle

If you like LED clocks and illuminated bicycle wheels, [Harald Coeleveld] has just the right weekend project for you. His RGB pixel LED clock is as simple as it is beautiful, and it can be built in no time: The minimalist and sporty design consist of not much more than a LED strip wrapped around a bicycle wheel rim.

[Harald] took 2 meters of addressable WS2812 LED strip (with 30 LEDs per meter, we assume), wrapped it around a 27″ bicycle rim padded with a foam strip, and obtained 60 equally spaced RGB LEDs on a ring, ideal for displaying …read more

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Staying In and Playing Skyrim Has Rarely Been This Healthy

Looking to add some activity to your day but don’t want to go through a lot of effort? [D10D3] has the perfect solution that enables you to take a leisurely bike ride through Skyrim. A standing bicycle combines with an HTC Vive (using the add-on driver VorpX which allows non-vr enabled games to be played with a VR headset) and a Makey Makey board to make slack-xercise — that’s a word now — part of your daily gaming regimen.

The Makey Makey is the backbone of the rig; it allows the user to set up their own inputs with electrical …read more

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Mechanical Horse-Bike

Oh [Rodger Cleye]! You had us at “unicycle, duct tape, styrofoam, and tie wraps”. But watching the horse-bike in action (video below) is just about enough for us to go out and make one ourselves. (For our child, naturally. We’re far too dignified.)

If you trawl around [Rodger]’s YouTube channel, you’ll see no end of odd motorized vehicles. Like last year’s motorized horse project, or this stormtrooper speeder. But there’s just something about the way that the horse’s legs move along with the rider that is slightly more enchanting. (That’s the “unicycle” part of the build.) And, we assume, the …read more

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A Strandbeest Bicycle

“If you’re asking ‘why,’ you don’t get it.” So said [JP] when he told us about his strandbeest bicycle build. After all, who in their right mind would graft a complex multi-leg mechanical walking mechanism to the rear end of a perfectly good bicycle? But to expand on his sentiment, to not understand his creation is to miss the whole essence of our movement. Sometimes you just have to make something, because you can.

If you aren’t familiar with the strandbeest, it is the creation of Dutch artist [Theo Jansen]. Complex skeletal walking machines powered by the wind, that …read more

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