The Digital Dirt Bike is a solar-powered information and communication center on wheels. It is designed to deliver communications to isolated villages in India.
A local technician drives from village to village to deliver treatments for common plant, animal and human diseases; weather forecasts; supplemental school lessons; and information for farming and industry. The unit contains a notebook computer, printer, camera, satellite phone and two solar panels, plus a portable tent for impromptu meetings.
Digital Dirt Bike is now successfully in use throughout Andra Pradesh, India.
DailyWireless has more on the Digital Pony Express (above). It is operating in Cambodia.
The system, developed by First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle’s battery. Five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village’s outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. Using 5 Honda motorcycles equipped with FMS Mobile Access Points, it links to 15 solar-powered village schools, telemedicine clinics, and governor’s office in a remote province of Cambodia
Joshua Kinberg’s Magicbike, is a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot, developed with his Parsons adviser, Yury Gitman. Bikes Against Bush, is Kinberg’s master’s thesis. A custom-written Perl and AppleScript application translates a text message (received by cell phone) into letters that use a 5-by-5-dot pattern based on Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen font. Kinberg was inspired by the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s GraffitiWriter, a graffiti-writing robot car. (See the group’s StreetWriter.)
