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Palm on a Bicycle
jcwise writes: "Want to use your Palm or Handspring as a bike computer? Here are two different products that use completely different approaches. I'm not sure if either are better than a $30 bike computer. With PDA prices falling, it might be a fun hack."
Would be a very expensive bike computer if you fell over and broke it.
Want to use your Palm or Handspring as a bike computer?
No.
all that's missing is a little meter that keeps track of how much time you're wasting by building this system.
mp3s by me
bikebrain All you need to do to get your t-shirt is send them the description and directions for 5 biking routes you like.
Special Offer - Get a free BikeBrain T-shirt by sending us 5 route sheets. Each route sheet needs to have a clearly defined starting point, distance points, (delta distances are optional), corresponding turn indications and descriptions. If yours are usable, we'll send you a free T-shirt. Follow the directions below for submitting a route.
STFU
I had this back in 1999. There's a shareware program that does all this and simply connects to a el-cheapo bike "puter" and uses it's reed switch as the pulse input on the rs232 port.
it was nice, graphs, averages, etc... it just sucked down batteries like mad. but it was a great addition to my recumbent trike.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So, you're riding along, and you're like, shoot, where am I going agian? So you whip out that handy stylus for that PDA, and you start writing. Pretty soon, you realize that you've let go of your handle bars, and run into one of those light posts that keep intruding where you bike.
Note that "BikeBrain is compatible with Pilot 1000/5000, PalmPilot Professional/ Personal, Palm III/x/e, Palm V/x. We do not support the Palm VII yet. " so you do not need the latest and greatest yet. Heck, you can get a Palm iiie in the palm store right now for under $80 bucks, plus shipping. That is not bad.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Though I can ride w/o hands, I'd probably crash playing chess or simcity on my way to school. Davis has way too many bikes. =P
"Not another bike distraction!!!"
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
is to get the magellan GPS unit. You get speed, plus you can create a log of your actual route. Absolute altitude is terrible on all GPS units, but you may be able to a pretty good slope reading. THe unit sends normal NMEA strings over a serial connection, so it's relatively trivial to write software for.
Magellan receivers lock on fast, and the handpring/magellan handspring module makes a nice, clean combination (relatively compact as a system, no external cables).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If one had an old PDA lying around, this might be fun to try.
But the form factor of the PDA seems less than ideal for biking. Bike computers are generally a lot smaller than a Palm and the Bikini approach in particular looks unwieldy. Besides, if I'm going to mount something that big onto my bike, it had better have a GPS receiver built in.
You are a waste of space. Please stop.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I'd like the parent post to be directed to the lowlife scum that's moderating posts as flamebait for no reason what-so-fucking-ever.
Is there a "Pocket PC on a Bike" in the near future too? I want to be able to ride my bike while watching PocketPr0n on my HP Jornada 548!
Chris
Not silly really, but a smilar system to monitor and log progress would be great for using with a static trainer.
there are several high end solutions, but nothing to log the data and dump it into a file for examination.
I found one, but the email address for the progammer was dead.
im new here and i would like to learn how to be a troll i tried some keywords in aol but it did not help me and someone gave me a link to another site here but they wont let me see it please help!!
The Palm certainly has the advantage that it is a tad smaller and probably easier to retrofit onto a standard bike that a Mac Plus is, but then again the usage of the Palm appears to be fare more limited in this case.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'm strangely turned on by this.
I saw the movie Collateral Damage last night -- The Arnold S. movie about a fireman seeking vengeance on a Columbian terrorist that was postponed for obvious reasons.
One scene near the end has the villian using a Palm IIIc (IIRC) with map software to navigate the tunnels beneath some capital building. He had it hooked up to his motorcycle, and presumably with a gps, as it was showing him where he was in real time.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
With PDA prices falling, it might be a fun hack."
It's not much of a hack if someone's done it before you and gave you instructions on how to do it yourself.
"Yes officer someone stole my computer."
"I see, is there anything that would distinguish it as yours?"
"Yes, it was attached to a blue Trek 5500 with a raccoon tail on the back of the seat."
I have a couple of the little Vetta and Cat Eye computers (well, hardly computers) on my bike already, just for mileage, speed, etc (I was going downhill about 37 mph yesterday on my mountain bike, whee!) and they're pretty good for basic information. For a few bucks more you can get heartrate and cadence (how fast you pedal) monitors. Bikebrain has had a nice unit which offers pretty much everything for quite a while, there are some high marks for it on rec.bicycles.* newsgroups. I bought a Garmin eTrex GPS to keep track of my rides, hikes, etc, and it has a little bracket which I can put on my handlebar and take it off easily (important since the mountain bike requires major hosing down after most rides) It's shock resistant to some large number of G's, more than I'd survive
It's important to remember that riding with one of these things it's not likely to take much of a beating, since you pretty much have to be there with it and it it's too much for it, you're probably splattered by now. Thou I'm not sure how well a hard disk might work in one, I wouldn't recomend it.
Biggest concerns will actaully be water/dust resistance, since this is what you get in the great outdoors, possibly heat if you ride in the sun a lot (LCD displays turn black if they get too warm, lot of help that would be), other concern is weight. Many riders try to strip weight off bikes, because it takes incrementally more energy to haul it up hills. Tiny Cat Eye and Vetta computers are ideal for everyday riding, where a bike computer I'd only use to chart rides, same as I do with my GPS, to get an idea of the profile and perhaps what cadence worked or didn't for me in the long run. Leave the heavy bits home when you're really out for a ride.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think a palm would last much after my first good wipeout. I use a Garmin etrex GPS (rugged, waterproof, small, and only $100). It records all the same stuff a bike computer does except cadence (although the palm units don't seem to do cadence either), plus it can tell you your route and so forth. It doesn't need to have any wheel sensors and extra wires strapped to the bike since it does all its measurement via satellite signal. It's a lot smaller than a palm, too (although somewhat bigger than a $30 bike 'puter) They sell a handlebar mount for it, and the computer sync cable lets you save your ride data and load route data in advance.
No?!
A bike computer? That sounds roughly equivalent to driver's side television. Oooh, yeah, how about the mile high club for pilots?
And hey, where does the guy live who says "With PDA prices falling"? I wonder if you can pick me one up. Where I am, they haven't even slipped, much less fell.
Oops
Yeah, I got a woody too.
But bicycle-based computing is hardly a new idea. This guy was doing it back in the days of the TRS-80 Model 100, and has written extensively about it. IIRC, there was a column in Byte or Creative Computing chronicling his adventures in "Computing Across America."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
That's spiffy for a lot of cyclists. But if you are a racer or you do tours or ultramarathon riding, it would also be very nice to ask questions like "what were my splits between miles 5-10 and 10-15?". It looks like BikeBrain has an altimeter in it, so it can also give you data like what your best time on a hill was, adjusted by the grade of the hill.
Most of the extra functions aren't things that you'd necessarily want to have access to while you were still riding, but a Palm is a very good way to capture data during your ride and then review it later.
I'd like to see even more telemetry available, like rider's pulse, blood pressure, and wind speed.
I don't know if it's my non-typical slashdot lifestyle, but I use my bike as my primary means of transportation. I live in Brooklyn, but affairs call me into the city nearly every day, so I end up biking about 6 to 12 miles 5 days a week. This would be a great secondary (albeit fringe) application for a handheld.
As for the breakage issue, I've been riding in Manhattan traffic for over 2 years now, and I've only had one accident so far. I've broken a lot more things by just dropping my backpack than I have wrecking my bike.
Finally, I think this could be the tool for messengers. I've done a bit of it and my roomate paid rent for a while pulling tags. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful bike messenger is not speed, its knowing where you're going and knowing how to get around the inside of buildings you make deliveries to. This would make a great on-board asset for professional messengers as it would allow them to share routes, both on the street and in buildings.
Think ahead a few years and a wireless connection would let dispatch download the next pickup or drop directly to the messenger's onboard computer. It would make them work a lot more like UPS or fedex.
Howard Dean for president
Dude crashes with a babydoll in the back, one of the funniest next to the one where he put the baby on the top of the car and started to drive away.
Tape the PDA to your spokes for that cool noise effect.
"And like that
I mean, in today's world with digital distractions everywhere, why should we put a computer on bicycles? Usually, when I go biking, it is to get some fresh air and to see the morning dew, etc, etc. Why do we need to play HardBall while we are biking?
Yeah right, like I'm going to put a fragile $300 PalmPilot onmy mountain bike when I go terrorizing up and down trails and downtown urban rides.
There's really no use for this stuff, as there are bike computers that are more versatile than this which are cheaper and better integrated with the bike.
Take for example Shimano's excellent Flight Deck technology, which integrates with their higher-level drivetrain components (XT, XTR, Ultegra, and Dura-Ace).
Don't ride Shimano? No problem! CatEye makes excellent bike computers as well!
Another major consideration would be weight. Most PalmPilots weigh about 1/2 a pound (200g). That's a huge weight penalty, especially considering most people do everything they can to lighten their bikes.
Moral of story: good attempt, but bad idea. I'll stick with my Flight Deck.
it's not a hack if you go out and buy the stupid thing.
A better hack would be to make my $30 bike computer store my address book and calendar...
I looked into using a Palm for a bike computer, and concluded that I wasn't very interested. I live in the Seattle area, and I ride in the rain. The BikeBrain solution comes with a plastic protector for your Palm, but it isn't really waterproof.
The good thing of course is that a Palm can capture a lot of data. But just capturing wheel spin data to show speed and distance isn't enough to make me buy either of these solutions.
Last autumn I bought myself a Specialized P.Brain computer. I love it; it collects wheel turn data (like the two Palm solutions) and also altitude and heart rate data. A PC interface lets you capture your data and make pretty charts. You can get a graph showing your speed, altitude, and heart rate plotted against either time or distance. Read more about it here.
The PC download software is for Windows; I'm planning to try to get it working under WINE if I can. The data is stored in some opaque binary format, but you can get the data out with Dan Connelly's Perl script (get it here.
The P.Brain isn't the only data-collecting bike computer. There are other brands. I have heard good things about the Polar XTrainer. There are even computer systems that directly measure your power output; you have a wheel built with a power-measuring hub, and the computer keeps track of power. Pro riders (including Lance Armstrong) use these. For example, the Power-Tap.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's because you losing five pounds isn't nearly as important as the bike losing a few pounds, especially in rotational weight (rims, spokes, tubes, tires). Pedalling an 18 pound bike versus a 23 pound bike is much easier, regardless of your weight.
Bringing new meaning to the term "Computer Crash"
Gee, I feel like I'm missing something here. I *always* use my palm (both of them, actually) when riding a bike.
When I was a teenager, I knew a guy who could do a _handstand_ on his handlebars, but a handspring?!? Sounds like a good way to wipe out, get hurt and trash your bike to boot!
.
These are hardly new... I recall looking at these about 2 1/2 years ago. Neat concept, now that you can pick up used Palm Pilots for almost nothing. Back then, it was a very expensive bike computer option.
-dc
Take a look at http://www.palmhalter.de/ (its german, use Google to translate it), where a friend of mine shows his own construction to fix a palm on nearly everything, even a bike ...
-kk-
I think it's absolutely amazing that I've never hit a bicyclist while driving. No matter how careful I am, there are always morons on bikes doing stupid things, breaking laws, and coming out of nowhere as if trying to make me hit them. I guess the really amazing thing is that they don't get hit more often by people less careful than me.
It would be nice if there was a thing that would attach to your weal to power your pda.
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