I want a featureful and easy to expand bike computer for my electric bicycle and I have a high performance computer with a great display that I carry around with me all the time so I am developing an Android accessory bike computer, the DroidCycle. I already have an “off the shelf” motor controller handling all of the high power electronics and I have developed my own LED driver module for driving the headlights and taillights from main battery power. For the Android interface and handling all the realtime sensor monitoring and control, I have selected the mbed LPC1768 because it has an available library for the ADK and the online compiler means that 1) I don’t have to waste any time setting up the toolchain myself and 2) I can work on my firmware in wherever I am in whatever tiny scraps of time I have.
Scripts
Blog syndication
This is a test! And also information. Since converting my website to run on wordpress, I have been playing around with various integration mechanisms, github twitter and google+. Twitter seems to work well enough for automatically tweeting when I post something. And it is possible to have google+ posts appear on my wordpress site but not the other way around which is a bit disappointing.
100V LED Buck driver
My electric bike is my primary mode of transportation so I need to be able to ride it under all conditions and at night that means I need light, lots of light. It seems silly to me to have a separate battery to power the lights when I have this nice big battery for the motor and it would be one more thing to remember to charge. The hiccup comes from the fact that the bike battery is at 48V (with a soon to come upgrade to 80V) so a switching power supply is needed.
New webpage
I am overhauling my website to run on WordPress and now that I’ve gotten over the initial learning curve, it looks like it really will make it easier for me to update more frequently. Look for more content trickling in.
Alfred Ω
Alfred is a productivity application for Mac that takes spotlight and makes it totally awesome. It is part launcher, part file system search and part command line interface. Making electrical Ohm’s law calculations isn’t difficult but it’s a common task ripe for automation so I made a extension for Alfred to handle these quick calculations.