While I was waiting for it, I fiddled around in the design to make sure it was right. I realize I should have checked the design first, and, running the electrical rule check (ERC) I found I had left the DVI connector ground unconnected. D’oh! Fortunately there are half a dozen other grounds which (usually) get all tied together, so I was lucky and when I wired one up, it worked perfectly the first time. (Note that this is the 2012-Feb-29 version with only 4 copies around.)

I’m updating the design and will send it off to BatchPCB and open it up for sale. I’ll also post the design files as my intent is for this project to be an Open Source Hardware (OSHW) project.

I started by purchasing the Glow Inc. Water-Based Glow in the Dark Paint Sample Pack to test what I’d need to do and how well it would work over different surfaces. It comes with one sample each of Glow Inc.’s “White”, “Ultra Green V10″, “Ultra Blue”, “Pure Blue”, and “Purple”. Glow Inc. claims “glow times” of 24+ hours for Ultra Green V10, 9 hours for Ultra Blue, 2 hours for White, 3 hours for Pure Blue, and 30 minutes for Purple.

I had some EMT conduit lying around so I put on a coat of gray primer and did some tests. On the first, I painted the glow colors in one coat over the gray primer. Since I heard the glow was sensitive to UV, I was curious if clear acrylic would affect charging, so one set was left open and the other covered in two coats of Krylon Clear Gloss Protective Spray Coating. On the second pipe, I painted over the primer with a stripe of cheap black gloss, a strip of clear purple (which didn’t show much clearness over the primer), and a strip of bright yellow. On each of the colored stripes, I applied one coat of each color in the sample pack. On the last piece of pipe, I painted a portion with the gloss black then went over most of the plain primer and black with Rust-Oleum 214944 Reflective 10-Ounce Spray, Reflective to see if it would work better than plain. This time I only applied the “Ultra Green” in one, two, and four coats, and one coat on the plain primer for comparison.

I didn’t note a specific need for how long to leave the paint exposed to light so I put them in hazy sun for an hour then brought them in. My initial reaction was that the glow was not particularly bright, although the full containers glowed considerably brighter than a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt I have. On the topmost pipe, darker under-colors indeed appear darker although purple-over-purple seems to work well (I expect that an undercoat of a matching color would work). In the middle pipe, the four-coat paint is brighter than the two coat which is brighter than one coat. Reflective spray yielded virtually no improvement. On the bottom pipe, the clear coating (on the right) did not affect the glow at all.

Glow Inc. water-based glow paint samples, freshly charged, photographed in a darkened room (ISO 1600, 1 second exposure, f4.2 on a Nikon Coolpix S3100).

I had done some earlier experiments where I left the paint for 10 minutes and found it completely discharged. Here is a similar result from this specific test after 30 minutes:

Glow Inc. water-based glow paint samples, 30 minutes after charging, photographed in a darkened room (ISO 1600, 1 second exposure, f3.9 on a Nikon Coolpix S3100).

As you can see, the paint is not glowing at all. Needless to say, I’m extremely disappointed in Glow Inc.’s products and would not recommend them to anyone. I do not know how Adobi achieved jeir results in the Night Bike Instructable, but one commenter did ask why the hour-by-hour series of pictures were only taken minutes apart according to the EXIF data embedded in the images.

Alas, my bike project will need to have some other way to make it unique.

I spoke with Officer Brian Bannerman of the Rochester Police Department and asked what information would be useful in the case of a bike theft. He said that when an officer takes a report, they ask for:

• Make (manufacturer)
• Model
• Serial Number
• Color(s)
• Any customizations that are unique (e.g. rear blinker is common but yellow panier bags are not.)

If you discover your bike has been stolen, call 911. An officer will arrive and take a report and either give it to you or give you the report number. I asked what to do if an officer does not take a report or is uncooperative, and he said to contact a shift supervisor by calling either the Division Patrol Office (428-9800 if east of the Genesee, 428-9810 if west) or, if the time is after business hours, call 911 and ask to speak to one.

Our friends suggested getting together for a “serial number party” and I said I’d make up blank cards to fill out. The goal was something small enough to carry at all times about as big as an ID card or credit card.

I’ve been dragging it to exhibitions and to Burning Man for the last 4 years. It never felt the same as that first year. The reason slowly materialized: I didn’t set it free. The first time I brought it to Burning Man, I let it have an adventure on its own by letting people take it wherever they wanted. But on all subsequent exhibitions, I kept it close by. It was a difficult, harrowing experience to try and find it after that first year and I didn’t want to repeat it. It would have been possible to add a tracking device, but in a way, I don’t think even that would have been satisfying.

So it’s been dying a slow, painful death. I killed its soul when I brought it out for the second time and didn’t let it run free. It’s looked sadder and sadder ever since — going from an experience to a toy. Of course, that’s all it really was in the first place: an elaborate toy, but in that initial presentation, I made it art. As egotistical as it seems, I fully believe that to be true. It was a unique, experiential art project that I made.

I couldn’t just throw it away — nor could I sell it. I couldn’t even give it away — for to whom?: only to someone who would let it live again. I didn’t really know what to do with it. I kept meeting people who wanted to see it and I’d occasionally trot it out to show them. The only real exception was my friend Sondra who advised to turn it into something else. Unlike other projects or products, I had a hard time seeing the Bike With 2 Brains as anything but the Bike With 2 Brains. It really permeated my perspective.

I finally decided to step up to the plate. I got out the Sawzall and took one last picture. I said, “goodbye, old friend” and started cutting.

Pieces of its corpse still haunt my garage and basement, but it’s all on its way to becoming something else. The seat will be a “portable” loveseat — kind of like a heavy patio furniture that I can bring to Burning Man. One of the front wheels and the back wheel are going to become a rear-steered tricycle — sort of an adult Big Wheels.

As my friend Toni says, “everything is on its way to being something else”.

The final minutes in my back yard.

I took a closer look a this and tried to make some kind of “energy currency.” It is valuable to keep things at a human-level, so a 100-Calorie apple seems to be a good choice. A 2.75-inch apple has about 100 calories. Conveniently enough, a peck contains about 25 of these size apples and a bushel, about 100.

For a smaller unit, a grape has about 3.4 calories (about 4 watt-hours) so 30 grapes (or maybe 5 6-grape bunches) makes one apple. For purposes of LED’s, though, we’re talking about 0.05 Calories or about 1/66th grapes. Thus, an even smaller unit could be a drop of maple syrup. There’s 200 calories in a 4-tablespoon serving (so that’s 16 Calories per teaspoon) and I put a little more than 12 drops into a 1/4 teaspoon, so each drop is about 1/3 Calorie (0.4 watt-hours); 10 drops makes a grape.

A candy sprinkle is about 0.07 inches across so about 877 fit in a teaspoon making each of them (assuming they’re made entirely from sugar) about 0.018 Calories each so there’s 18 in a drop of syrup. Let’s call it 20 sprinkles, so 960 would fit in a teaspoon and each is 1/60 Calories. So now we’ve got:

• 1 sprinkle = 1/60 Calories
• 20 sprinkles = 1 drop of maple syrup = 1/3 Calorie
• 10 drops maple syrup = 1 grape = 3.4 Calories
• 6 grapes = 1 bunch of grapes = 20 Calories
• 5 bunches of grapes = 1 apple = 100 Calories
• 25 apples = 1 peck of apples = 2500 Calories
• 100 apples = 1 bushel of apples = 10000 Calories

I’m afraid I’m going in the wrong direction with this. Although it’s neat to see the conversions, I think it makes things _less_ intuitive — calorie numbers may be best because they’re compact to represent. This may be a useful way to get people to think about calories, though … like an LED can run for an hour on the energy in 3 candy sprinkles, or that it takes 3 bushels of apples to match the energy in a gallon of gas.

To help people manage their energy choices, I’d like to make the radical suggestion that you look at everything you bring simply for its energy content. Well, let’s say limited to the devices that generate or convert energy forms, fuel, and things to burn. Including the food for people.

The key is to examine the energy with some common unit (although the sources of energy would be put in separate tables.) I want it to be the Calorie (with a big “C”; kilocalorie, that is … the one we use for food.) Obviously, then, all your food will be broken down into a list of the total calories. Gasoline, for instance, at 36.5 kilowatt-hours per gallon works out to an equivalent of 31,400 Calories per gallon (that’s almost 16 days at 2,000 Calories per day, in case you’re curious.)

For devices that take energy as input (i.e. gasoline in a generator) and produce energy as output (i.e. electricity from a generator) then you’d note it on the “source” energy table as a thing that consumes (i.e. a loss) and a supply of energy (i.e. a gain) on the “destination” energy table. For something like a solar panel, it would simply produce energy without consuming any — although it is from sunlight, you don’t carry the sunlight in with you (despite the neat metaphor.) Consumers of energy would just show up as negatives (i.e. light bulbs would consume electrical energy; people would consume food.)

So a really basic set of tables for a camp of 10 people for 6 days who want to bring a 5KW generator, 5 gallons of gas, and a 100-watt string of lights they intend to run for 6 hours each day, it would look like this:

Food
----
+120,000 Amount of food to bring
-120,000 10 people consuming 2,000 Calories a day for 6 days consume 120,000 Calories.
--------
0

Gasoline
--------
+157,000 5 gallons of gas
- 52,000 Energy used by the generator to run the lights (see note below.)
-105,000 Take home 3.1 gallons of gas
--------
0

Electricity
-----------
+3,100 Energy produced by the generator to run the lights (see note below.)
-3,100 100 watts * 6 hours per day * 6 days
------
0

(A note about the generator efficiency: a not-too-unusual 5500 watt generator I found on the Internet consumes 0.63 gallons/hour at peak efficiency of 50% capacity (2750 watts). Simply scaling that linearly would mean that 100 watts would consume 0.023 gallons/hour or about 720 Calories-per-hour and produce 86 Calories-per-hour. However, a gasoline engine’s efficiency falls sharply when it’s not being run at ideal power, so I’m guessing the efficiency would be twice as bad, thus, for the same 100 watts, it’s 0.046 gallons/hour or about 1440 Calories-per-hour. Multiplying that out for the 6 days at 6 hours a day and it’s 51,840 Calories.)

[Anyway, this camp chose their generator quite poorly and they probably wouldn't have, but I'm just using it as an example. It took me a while to piece the numbers together, but all these conversions can be provided in a table.]

Now the trick is to make it less like doing U.S. Income Taxes and more like fun. I talked with my friend Sondra Carr about it and she suggested one of those slide-rule kind of wheels to do conversions because she finds them more fun that filling out forms. I had suggested units of “loaves of bread” or something and she liked that — especially if this could all be coupled with a camp where you’d make a solar-baked loaf of bread, and while it’s baking, to learn about how to do this analysis and to get a slide-rule wheel with the pertinent information.

Anyway, what’s the education about it? My goal is to make it like the “remove packaging before you leave so you don’t have to carry so much trash home” kind of elegance. I like that statement because it makes perfect sense and if you follow it, you go “wow: why is there all this friggin’ packaging?” as you look at the pile in your living room when you’ve gone through all your convenience foods. It doesn’t judge or condemn or make more work to make you learn something.

This is what I like about this:

• I think it can be made into a useful tool to help analyze a camp’s energy usage. It’s one of those things that gets overlooked in the planning process. How many of us have heard, “I don’t know … just grab a 1,000 watt generator and bring like 20 gallons of gas and we should be all set.”
• I think Calories put it into a human perspective: I had never done the conversion, but to think that the energy in a gallon of gas is the same amount of energy the average person needs for two weeks … wow.
• I think it shows how inefficient generators are and helps to identify where your energy goes. There is probably more work to be done here — I had originally wanted to do one big table so I could show waste (i.e. 52,000 Calories of gas becomes 3,100 Calories of electricity so 95% of the energy in the gas is wasted) but it was too cumbersome to present.
• I think it gives people a tangible idea of what energy is and where it goes. There is probably more work to be done here … I mean making it more concrete — make apples the unit (so a gallon of gas would be equivalent to about 350 apples) or bread … I like bread because it’s so rooted in cultural traditions.

I tinkered around with the copper model a little to see what would look least stupid — 24″ front wheels and 9″ back wheels will probably look pretty silly. I decided to maintain the existing frame design as best I could (i.e. least amount of work to change) and just extend a leg with a decorative (and suspension-flex) bend in it and weld it to a plate, bolted to the caster. I had the plates from straight wheels I bought for my bicycle trailer, so I canabalized them for the project. I bent a piece of 1″ water pipe then cut it so the bottom was perpendicular to the straight part of the pipe on top which gets welded to the old steering tube used with the original back wheels. It looks like the back end will ride a little higher with the new wheels, but not by much.