Josh Kinberg’s bicycle receives text messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters. Then he blogs a digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider cruises along.
Popular Science says the self-described “hacktivist,” other school projects have included Magicbike (a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot he and a professor take to outdoor cultural events) and the Hello World Project, which let people laser-project their own messages onto landscapes and landmarks all over the world.
Kinberg will officially roll out the bike during August’s Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be found at bikesagainstbush.com where you can see video of it in action.
Here’s how it works:
- Nokia 3650 cellphone receives a text message sent from Kinberg’s site. If the rider wants to print it, he sends it via Bluetooth to a Powerbook.
- AppleScript and Perl code translate each letter into a 5-by-5 dot-matrix pattern and send binary code to a black box containing a BASIC stamp microcontroller.
- Code is translated into high- or low-voltage signals, and sent via homemade serial cable to five relay switches housed in a custom-made Plexiglas box.
- Relays fire electromagnetic solenoids, powered by a 12-V gel cell battery.
- Solenoid pistons trigger nozzles on inverted spray-chalk aerosol cans to blast out a dot. The rate of fire adjusts automatically based on the rider’s speed.
- GPS device captures the position of the sprayed message, and the webcam snaps a pic; both are uploaded through the cellphone’s GPRS to a blog.
DailyWireless “built” a Wireless Bike using an IBM ThinkPad connected to a Wireless ISP (VeriLAN). We used a Lucent USB client connected to a panel antenna. PCTel’s SoftAP (using an SMC WiFi card) provides the local hotspot. It works up to 12 miles from the VeriLAN tower. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a captive portal splash page. Perhaps a battery-powered, Linksys WRT-54G with Portless NoCat firmware will provide better “park access”. Don and I are off to Wacky Willy’s.
Tom Higgins and Don Park got together Saturday to build a battery-operated PersonalTelco node and I (Sam Churchill), watched over their shoulder. The battery-operated access point won’t need a computer and will capture nearby surfers. Local content is planned for these mobile hot spots.
Their modified Linksys WRT54g (ver 1.0) is stuffed with a custom make of the very cool EWRT firmware. It is being powered by 6 D cell NiCads. A script Don wrote dumps nocat from the iptables for doing debugging. It was made into a bin and loaded onto the Linksys.
Tom Higgins writes:
The big issue to resolve is a DNS one. When not connected to a DNS server folks who try to surf to any old URL are not getting splashed by Nocat, rather they get a DNS error (cant find host etc etc). This sort of blows for running this as a true stand-alone. Don is looking into dns-fu to make it so all roads (urls) lead to the PTP splashing.
Don, the author of AP Radar, a Linux based graphical netstumbler and wireless profile manager, wants to get a kismet drone to run on the WRT54G so he can easily carry it on his bike. It would log nearby hotspots, automatically. No laptop required. Tom used Keith Lofstrom’s page on Powering the BEFW11S4 and WRT54G with batteries. Irving Popovetsky, one of the co-developers of the Portless firmware adds that Version 1 of the WRT 54G hardware (not recommended) takes a 5V input, while Version 2 hardware (with the recommended 200 Mhz processor), takes 12V.
UPDATE: Node 236 is now Mobile!
