This thing, this Goldsprints, (or Rockysprints, as it may be here) is eating up Nerd-Hours faster than a hipster fixie rider goes through rear tires after watching MASH SF for the eighth time.
The usual crew came by my place tonight; Wiley, Adam , and now Paul to stay in the basement to play with code; Sethanol to talk music and help drink beer (and pedal the bike when needed); and Captain Entropy himself to eat, drink, and make things fall apart.
This time, 'the usual crew' does not imply 'the usual results'. Oh no, we've got ourselves a veritable roller-racing extrapolanza one tiny step shy of being ready to drag on downtown. We rebuilt the second sensor board. We made lengthy twisted wire leads (with a drill...fun!). We even got the computer to work properly, mostly. All we need to do now is to find out why the computer is getting noisy results from one board, then we're on to mounting the stuff on the rollers. Done.

Tomorrow........

After extensive breadboard testing, the first actual sensor board is complete. One more to do, then Adam gets the computer and boards for final testing. Friday night we try everything out at my place, then itls on to the 317 on Monday!

OK, here it is folks, there are some minor details to work out, but the gist of it goes like this.

The code monkeys seem to have the software/hardware interface...ahem bitwacking. I think the problem had something to do with the Flux Box. Frankly, all this business about 'open source' is great and all, but it took not one, but two of the most savvy computer geeks I know to get all this to work...not exactly plug and play, more like plug, eff with it a bunch, swear a lot, drink some PBR, discuss, rewrite the code, play.



Geekery, Bikes, and PBR...somehow it just works.

I think bit whacking the flux box became less of an issue when they double teamed it.



Anyway the long and the short of it is we have the computer side of it 99% up and running.

As for the bike interface...

Steve's got the fork mounts welded up, to which we have affixed some bike tights.




and fabricated-ish with some rollers to mount the bikes to. It ain't pretty, but it does work.



So for now, the tentative plan (as opposed to the firm plans we've had thus far) is to meet Tuesday night (Mañana) at 317 at nine PM for some real world testing of our handy work. There very well may be some bugs to work out, but the question remains...Do you has?!?!



Any questions? Leave comments, or get ahold of DNA.

Cheers,
Crystal

Goldsprints Status:
The software is on my computer and seems to work
The hardware is assembled (on breadboard), firmware updated and seems to work.
Computer and Bitwacker seem to talk
I can't get the software to work right, I think it's just a setting thing in a conf.yml file but I'm lost.
Fork mounts are welded.
If we can get this stuff to work today we can race tonight.

Here's where we're at:
Electronic components are ordered and should be here by Friday, when Wiley and I will solder everything together. Once I have the BitWacker I can download and install the software.
Saturday night (hopefully) will be testing night. Sunday night (hopefully) we can Steve's rollers and try everything out at my place. Monday we race!

Or something along those lines.

So here we are:
Steve said he was going to make the fork mounts.
Casey and I have bikes
Steve and I have rollers
I am ordering the hardware for the computer interface today
We've got a lot of people really anxious to get this going.

My projected date for the first race is Feb 25th, assuming that I can get the hardware talking to the computer and that I can successfully solder stuff without letting the magic smoke out. There's no way I can get it going this coming Monday. Sorry.

In other news, I FINALLY BUILT MY CROSS BIKE!
Sorry for the shouting, but I'm pretty damn excited. Here's a pic:
It's an '05 Cannondale cyclocross disc built with Tiagra. My favorite part about it is the Captain America theme. I swear I can hear the "Star Spangled Banner" while coasting.

How about Tuesday night (tomorrow) at 8pm we meet at 317 to figure out who's doing what, who can help how, who has parts they'll donate.........and maybe we'll drink some beer.
Good? Ok. See you tomorrow. 317.

Cycling has lost an icon, a leader, a friend. Sheldon Brown helped countless cyclists become true bike geeks with his voluminous stores of knowledge and a gift for sharing that with others. He knew about bike minutiae without coming off as cocky and had an infectious passion that kept our bikes rolling.
Have a good ride, Sheldon. We'll miss you.

Here's a link