February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
1 post
WatchNew developments in Chicago’s bicycle infrastructure. Now if only Pittsburgh can get some more of that.
“Cities for Cycling” Campaign by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
http://nacto.org/cities-for-cycling/
December 2011
2 posts
We are officially PATENT PENDING!!!
Indeed we are :)
Infographic Of The Day: How Bikes Can Solve Our... →
October 2011
1 post
Anything is Possible: Hellman - Chang →
The 3rd part of Core77’s series about the Brooklyn furniture design firm, Hellman - Chang, really gives a great picture of our situation right now. I admire Hellman and Chang’s unwavering dedication to their love of crafting furniture and passion to make their dreams into a reality. It’s funny how before our award for Aura, such articles would just be another interesting read,...
September 2011
2 posts
NY Times Article about cycling the Dutch way →
Aura Abroad #1: A Taste of Bike Culture
Today not only starts the beginning of Ethan and my school year at TU/e but also the kickoff of the first entry in the Aura Abroad series. Look forward to our (hopefully) weekly observations and progress as we continue our studies here in Eindhoven.
The first thing immediately evident in the Netherlands are the sheer volume of bicycles. The above photo is of all the bicycles outside of the...
August 2011
1 post
Aura travels to Eindhoven
As the title says, Ethan and I are now residents of Eindhoven, a city in the Netherlands. A bit of a ways from Pittsburgh for sure. We’re here as part of an exchange program with their ID department which I am tremendously pumped for!
What this also means is that Aura is not hitting the shelves any time soon. However, as many of you know, the Dutch truly define ‘bike culture’,...
July 2011
1 post
Core77 Design Awards FTW!
As luck would have it, we won the Core77 Design Award student prize for the Transportation Design category! Watch the announcement here. It’s kind of surreal to have won such an award given on an international scale, but its quite validating for us as young designers. Who would have thought Carnegie Mellon would win an award in the transportation design division?
As far as a quick...
June 2011
1 post
100,000 Thanks
We have surpassed the 100,000 view mark on our Vimeo video, a remarkable feat that we never would have dreamed would be possible. So a big THANKS! To those who have helped us get there.
Just to let you all know what’s going on, here’s an update:
We are now beginning on the road towards commercialization. I (Jonathan) am currently spending the summer at the lovely Carnegie Mellon...
May 2011
5 posts
Thanks Everyone! Now to Clear Things Up
Wow. This has been a crazy week and the response from the community has been awe inspiring and, for us at least, quite overwhelming! Over 46,000 views of the videos alone! We had never expected Project Aura to receive this kind of response. Now to clear of some things we noticed in the comments.
Why don’t you have front and rear lights in the video?
The reason being that we simply did not...
7 tags
Filming and Shooting
Last week we also got around to filming the bike more indepthly. Kelly managed to take some incrdible photos of the bike (and Conrad) in action, something we always managed to miss. Here are a few of those photographs
Conrad riding for his life
Finishing Up: The Final Chapter
A semester ago, we had no clue what we were doing or how we were doing it. We just had an idea and a large chunk of change to see it through.
We had many mishaps, many long nights, many close calls with the soldering iron as well as a brand new pair of iron levers (and a new layer of skin for Ethan). But here we are, and here is our bike. Call it Tron, if you will, but we call it Project Aura; a...
Meeting of the Minds
Last week marked the official end of our SURG project. We set up our poster in the Kirr Commons, propped up the bike against the stools displaying our laptops and answered people’s questions about our project (all while competing with the noise of the Vibratron close by).
Yes, judging by this awkward picture, we belong at CMU. We had applied for some competitions, but due to our lack of...
April 2011
4 posts
WatchHere’s a teaser video of the bike in motion. Filming these videos was the first time we ever ran the bike this long, which somewhat surprised us with the amount of trouble we were having before. Hopefully the strips in the rims won’t short out again!
WatchEnjoy. Next step, true testing.
WatchOur first true ride! We still need to attach the diffusers to the wheels (that’s why you can only see it from the front-ish and back-ish). And ugh, the front wheel won’t turn white. Yet another thing to trouble shoot.
Why Can't it just Work
Amazingly, we have hit every single deadline we had set for ourselves: a spinning wheel by Confluence, and finalizing the bike fabriation by April 1st. That is not to say we haven’t had our moments of despair.
Anyways, here is the bike after we put everything together (keep in mind, the wheels weren’t true at the time)
Surprisingly the slipring contacts line up fine. We were...
March 2011
4 posts
WatchSpin test #2. This time with the wheel attached to the frame and permanent sliprings in place!
Spin, Spin, Spin
Here’s a better picture of the bike wheel spinning with the LED’s. This time the sliprings are fully functional, requiring only a couple spins!
On Hiatus For the Time Being...
It’s moose time. Soft goods + Confluence + study abroad = SURG hiatus. Time to moose ahead.
Going for a Twirl
Look! No hands! The permanent slipring/runner assembly now complete. When steve said that would be the biggest challenge in creating the sliprings, boy was he right. In the picture, the hub generator is powering the lights on the wheel. Here are some close ups of the runners.
Notice the contacts. They were harvested from a hairdryer we have to take apart for How Things Work and are just the...
February 2011
21 posts
WatchBreak Through
(skip to 0:39 for the real fun)
This video documents our first test of the spinning lit up wheel. Very exciting to see the culmination of weeks of efforts into a very tangible…something! In the video, Ethan and I are manually holding the copper runners against the slip-ring we made earlier to power the lights.
All the lights are powered by the hub generator.
The hub...
Another Big'un
Tonight was yet another huge night for us and Project Aura. Heres a short checklist of what we accomplished
- laced front rim
- soldered 2nd (and last, thank goodness) LED strip
- soldered part of the slip ring
- mounted the LED strip to the rim
-SPUN AND TESTED THE WHEEL!!!
We had, of course, plenty of mishaps along the way like confusion about how to thread the rim in a three cross...
WatchBBBOOODDDYYY SSCCAAANNN!!! Just messin’ around, until we broke it. One of the leads popped off. Oh well…
WatchNew LED strips soldered and taped in our newly drilled larger rims! Powered by the hub dynamo being rolled on the floor. We noticed a weird phenomenom though: only the red LEDs remained lit after hub dynamo output decreased. This may or may not be a good thing, as we had intended the white light to transition to red as the rider was braking. Regardless, the light output was incredible! The...
Soldering On
An hour and half (?) of tedious soldering 4 wires sets to 6 LEDs and we have one strip of LED’s done! The leads were incredibly close to each other, rendering each solder a great chore.
Even though we are only planning on using white (combination of all 3 RGB LEDs) and red, we still soldered 4 wires onto each lead to enable us to change the strip to different colors in the future. Our...
Slipring: The Final Chapter
Drilled, shaped, and bolted. Our slip rings essentially complete (save for the holes for the wires). Our Illustrator templates seemed to have been decently accurate, save for a little bit of fudging. We just need to get our spokes and coldset the frame and try these puppies out.
Slipring episode 3: SUCESS
We got it to work. Turns out the problem the first ime around was the ironing. This time we cranked up the heat and moved the iron around on the board while applying pressure.
Peeling away the paper with excitement:
It came out pretty much perfectly:
Now for its acid bath. To fully dissolve the copper took close to half and hour. Good thing we had the soothing words of Ira...
Slipring episode 2: laser cats
Well no cats, but we did use lasers. We had read about a different technique to transfer the pattern to the board. You paint the copper board with black spray paint, then use a laser cutter to burn away all of the paint where we don’t want copper. After that the process is the same as the toner transfer, you soak it in the acid to remove all unwanted copper.
We made up a test piece from...
Slipring episode 1: FAIL
So we started our slipring adventures this weekend after a $50 trip to radioshack. The slipring is one of the most crucial parts of the project. It is essentially a disc with concentric copper channels on it mounted at the hub of the bike, so we can transfer power from the frame to the moving bike wheel. We need a 4 channel slip ring, 1 to supply the +12v to the leds, and then the LEDs have...
Rims and Grins
For more reasons than one. But we have them! Alex DM18 - $28 a rim. Wide enough to seat the LED’s comfortably and walls thin enough to allow the acrylic diffuser to make contact with the strip. Really, a steal more like. If only that could be said for the rest of the bike parts we need to buy: spokes, centerlock adapter, bolts (for the slip rings), spoke wrench…and that pushed us...
BIKEBIKEBIKEBIKEBIEKBIEKBKEKEKEIBIKE!
As indicated by the title, we now have a full bike to work on. Bought it off of a guy on craigslist for $170, which hopefully we’ll be re-imbursed. The pedals are a bit odd (they’re for a BMX bike), the front chain-ring, Ethan noted, looks awfully large, and finally the brake is not very well made. But hey! We have fully functional bike! This weekend has shaped up to be yet another...
Three Weeks
Two weeks until Portland. Three weeks until soft goods and Confluence. Three weeks until we want to have a close to working prototype of our system! Soon, very soon. Here’s the docket for this weekend:
- buy bike for hopefully $170
- make slip rings
- drill rims
- solder LEDs?
And with all our classes finally starting to pick up, we are trying to get a lot done this weekend. Wish us...
Project Aura
We officially named the project today, not really a big step but its something.
WatchA glimpse at what is to come.
We added smoothing capacitors to the circuit which significantly reduced dramatic flicker. The intermittent flicker is merely due to Ethan rotating the dynamo back and forth. We noticed that with less LED’s (18 instead of 60), the dynamo was outputting on average more than 12VDC, which initially worried us. But seeing as we’re not expecting the...
WatchA quick test with 1 LED strip to see if it can handle the voltage fluctuation of the dynamo from 13VDC and up. Turns out it’s hard to burn out these little guys. (Oh, and the crinkling noise you hear is me rolling the hub dynamo on paper)
Sunlight and Bike Light: a Perfect Weekend
This weekend proved to be a huge leap forward in our SURG project. Here’s what we did:
made a jig to drill out our rim
drilled the 6 groups into our test rim
soldered 6 groups of LEDs together (an hour simply just to do this)
added a 2200 uF capacitor to our circuit (thinking of replacing it with a 4700 uF one)
hooked up the LED’s to the newly drilled rim
created two types of...
Watchhub dynamo -> full wave bridge rectifier -> 60 LEDs -> glorious light
So it works. Finally, some kind of vindication that proves (at least partially) that a hub dynamo can power the LEDs. Yes, the resistance was enormous and you would most definitely not want that to be dragging you down, but keep in mind we’re only using 38 of those LEDs. Which may be a big difference.
We just...
to do
After a trip to radio shack, we actually got the hub to power the led strip through the bridge rectifier, more on that and a video of it working in the next post. Now that we have some validation that this system actually works, we have a new list of stuff that we have to get done to get to our next milestone, which is to have a working moving bike with this system.
decide on number of LEDs we...
Plan D...E... J?
Steve brought an excellent website to our attention. A great resource for us in the realm of electrical circuits. The only problem? Now we know what won’t work.
Each LED group of three = .72 watts and 12 of these groups require 8.64 watts. An average casual biker around 153 lbs outputs about 210 watts. Though it might not sound that much, it is actually almost 3x’s the usual output...
Frame and fortune
We got a frame, and I felt like making a cheesy post title. Despite the lack of sleep due to our fire extinguisher crit this morning, we also made some progress this afternoon. We disassembled my old rear rim today and drilled it and started testing different diffusion/projection methods.
Thats the frame there, $30 off craigslist. We took the fork off, the headset was completely shot as...
Seeing the Light
Of first note, the RGB LED strip is a godsend. Dear Brian Kirby, you were right…again.
First purchase finally in! We have quite a bit of supplies to do some initial testing (or at least thinking). But again we have revamped some of our thinking. Here’s where we are at:
Chuck the chukkers - we have no need for big beefy Deep V’s anymore. In fact we want the lowest profile...
January 2011
3 posts
Purchase #1 On the Way
Our orders are one their way! Let’s hope they get here quickly so we can get moving before Portland.
First Purchase!
Well I guess this means we have officially started the project. We bought the dynamo hub and a bunch of electrical components including out RGB LED strip to start playing with. Last week we built a test stand for my old trashed wheel and we are going to use that as a test bed for now and purchase our wheel parts at a later date.
Gotta keep our eye on those red numbers at the top!
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
So far in our SURG project, we have realized one thing: we don’t know anything. All our preconceptions of what could work were way off. Did we get money for a proposal we really didn’t even understand ourselves? It’s possible, but we have goal and a vision. That’s what counts.
Here’s what we’ve learned.
- Linear induction as a power source: not feasible,...