(Automobile) Pi Cycles

Marcus Hays learned a lot from working on the Iacocca ebike project and in 2000 formed his own company called PiMobility, to try to develop a more perfect electric bike. One of his main ideas is to take the plastic out of the design. Marcus blames the plastic for the vibration and jankiness that many ebikes have. The Picycle contains no major plastic pieces; even the fenders are made from aluminum. Also, Marcus wanted to build a bike that was beyond anything else dependable. The PiCycle is made with proven components, which he feels will sustain a long life-cycle. The batteries are lightweight lithium polymer and are therefore only good for 500 charges, but the battery pack is easily replaceable and by the time most users go through 500 cycles there will likely be better and cheaper battery technologies available as replacements.

The second priority of the Picycle is to look stylish and cool. When first starting the company, Marcus tried 10 different designs, but it was the Picycle design which he found really struck a chord with consumers.  He describes the defining moment when he decided to stick with this outlandish futuristic design when travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a trade show with a protoytpe Picycle strapped to the roof of the car. They were swamped with inquiries at every rest stop and at one point a bus full of Japanese tourists swarmed the Pi to photograph it. To Marcus, that was the proof of concept to go with the Picycle as a half-arc designed frame.

Marcus knew from his days with E-bike that the reliability of the bike was going to be critical if it was going to be sold to a mass market. As part of his learning process, Marcus worked as a volunteer in bicycle shop in the repair department for a year and a half to get an understanding of broken bikes, and what components usually failed.  He wanted to make the PiCycle so simple, that any bicycle shop in the country could maintain and repair it. For example, PiCycle chose a Shimano IGH shifter coupled with a Gates belt-drive propulsion system for minimal maintenance–there’s no chain to oil on this bike.

The motor and controller were chosen after rigorously testing many different models, and have been designed to be ridden every day for years without failure. Picycle uses a direct-drive hub-motor with hall-sensors made by Crystalyte, which is known for being solid (same brand of motor used on the Stealth Bomber). There is only one moving part in this model of Crystalyte Motor. The downside is that it is heavy, and at 18 pounds it is a lot of weight to have in your front wheel. That said, Picycle claims their bikes handle fine on paved roads.

Unique Features of Pi-Cycle :-

It's a bicycle...it's a motorcycle...it's a revolution.
Go faster, farther, and steeper than ever before with PiCycle’s™ new hybrid belt drive. Meld human and electric energy to seamlessly create an unmatched experience.

Superpower at the flick of your fingertip.
Turn A to B into 0 to WHEE. With PiCycle™'s powerful battery, you have the equivalent to several professional cyclists helping you pedal. Don't break a sweat, and have more fun than ever as you casually pass full-spandex clad cyclists on their left.

Miles Per Penny is the new M.P.G.
Liberate yourself from the wallet draining cost of oil and instead power your pocketbook.

Give back to the battery pack.
With the push of a button power flows back to the battery pack and charges the bike. This extends your range, lets you recover downhill energy, and gives you grid independence.

A design that's totally tubular.
With all the electronics inside the tube the components stay weatherproof, allow the battery to stay cool, and optimize your handling.

There's even an app for that.
An integrated app that runs on any smartphone gives you an intuitive readout of the speed, charge level and efficiency. Also, it pushes data to the cloud and provides remote diagnostics so we can alert you if your bike needs maintenance.

Charge anytime, anywhere.
E-bike infrastructure is already in every house and outlet around the world. Simply plug into any standard wall outlet, whether in public, in a café, or at home.

Cooler wheels for a warmer planet.
PiCycle™ is designed and manufactured with the highest of lifecycle and sustainability standards.

(Innovation) Lamps that Use Your iPhone’s Flash as a Light

This may not be the best idea in practice but conceptually it’s pretty neat- a bedside iPhone dock that looks like a lamp and uses your iPhone’s camera flash as the light. Designed by Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer of Raw Edges Design this concept looks great but it’s actually a pretty awkward way to be a lamp. (not as awkward as the phrase “to be a lamp” but awkward nonetheless). Interesting concept though.
(via gizmodo)

(Utilities) Hammer-Proof Smartphone Screen is Thinner and Cheaper Than Gorilla Glass

As long as we’ve had smartphones, we’ve been afraid of dropping them. With price tags of $500 and above, smartphones are delicate technological flowers that can be killed by a single drop of water or a collision with the ground. That’s why we’re excited about a new screen protecting material called Rhino Shield. Made from a custom-formulated polymer, the material is able to withstand full-on strikes with a hammer, and it’s poised to make Gorilla Glass look like flimsy wrapping paper.

Developed by Cambridge-based Evolutive Labs, Rhino Shield has a shock-damping layer that is “able to take at least 5 times the impact energy of Gorilla Glass 2.”

To prove their point, the makers of Rhino Shield videotaped an impact test in which they struck the screen of a iPhone 5 with a hammer. If you’re an Apple lover, it might be hard to watch – but don’t worry, the poor little phone lives to tell the tale. Even a 9 ounce steel ball dropped from a height of over 19 inches failed to scratch the screen and left the phone ‘fully usable,’ reports The Daily Mail.

The protective polymer sheet can be fitted to the iPhone 5, 5S and 5C, and it does not affect the touchscreen’s sensitivity, according to the designers. “The screen comes with a self-adhesive silicone back and as the user wipes a cloth along the front of the film, it clings to the phone’s screen, but can be removed if necessary.”

Watch a 'drop test' on hammer glass - watch

Best part? It’s retailing for less than $30.

Via The Daily Mail

(Ideas) We See the Future Better Than 20/20

Steve Austin had that enviable telescopic squint. Star Trek chief engineer Geordi La Forge saw darkness as daylight with his 24th-century ocular implants. And now it looks like a generation of very real people who have lost their sight are next in line for such seemingly sci-fi vision. “I’m hesitant to use the word ‘superpower,’ ” says Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., an electrical-engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is building the world’s first implantable camera for the blind. But if the device works, he says, “a blind person will have abilities you and I don’t.” Tanguay’s intraocular camera is part of a multimillion-dollar USC effort backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to develop an artificial retina to restore sight to people whose light-sensitive cells have burned out as a result of decay or disease. That’s 10 million people. The project is paying off: Six blind volunteers now have an electrode-studded sliver of silicone tacked to one of their retinas. A digital camera mounted to sunglasses feeds images wirelessly to this implant, whose 16 electrodes zap retinal nerves to produce impressions of light in the brain. Although the resolution is crude next to the 100-million-pixel resolution of a healthy eye, the volunteers can distinguish cup from plate, light from dark, and they can tell when someone strolls past on the sidewalk. “And we can do better,” says USC ophthalmology professor Mark Humayun, the surgeon who pioneered retinal implants and now directs the university project. He intends to implant a 60-electrode sensor with nearly four times the resolution of the original by early 2006 and a 256-electrode chip a few years later. His ultimate goal is 1,000 electrodes. “That should allow people to recognize a face and read,” Humayun says. He’s giving himself less than a decade to do it. It’s no slam-dunk. “Imagine throwing your TV set in the ocean and making it work,” says Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, the California firm that builds the retinal implants. The eye is filled with saltwater that can corrode electrodes. And then there’s the fact that humming electronics can sear nerves and blood vessels. This is why Tanguay’s plan to put the camera inside the eye is so bold. The aspirin-size device he’s building consists of an aspherical glass lens and a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor—which produces less heat than a conventional CCD (chargecoupled device)—packed in a watertight tube. The camera would sit just behind the pupil, in the small pouch where the eye’s crystalline lens normally is. For people with artificial sight, not only would an implantable camera mean no more goofy spy-cam sunglasses, they wouldn’t have to sweep their heads constantly to scan their surroundings—that’s what the eye does, naturally. Tanguay says his camera’s three-millimeter focal length will make objects appear crisp no matter how far or close they are, something even the eye can’t manage. And he could use a sensor tuned to infrared light, the basis for night-vision scopes, so blind people could see in the dark. One of his colleagues, biomedical engineer James Weiland, prefers the Bionic Man archetype. “You could hook our system up to an electron microscope and give someone super vision,” he says. He’s only half joking.—MICHAELSTROH

(Ideas) Phonebloks: Modular Phone Snaps Together Like LEGO Bricks So You Never Have to Throw It Away

It seems like most people get a new cellphone every year these days – and while that’s good news for phone manufacturers and telecoms, it’s not helping our wallets or the environment. Enter PhoneBloks – a brilliant concept phone made from a series of modular components that can be snapped together like LEGO bricks. As technology continues to evolve at an ever-increasing clip, individual parts of the phone can be swapped out instead of tossing the whole thing away.

Istead of the wasteful smartphone upgrade process that creates landfills of discarded phones, designer Dave Hakkens suggests a new type of phone made up of modules, or bloks, that can easily be replaced over time, piece by piece.

Want more storage? Take out the old memory module and replace that. You could do the same thing for the processor, camera, screen, and virtually any piece of the entire phone. The only thing that stays the same is a board that all the modules plug into like LEGO pieces.

It seems like a simple idea that someone should have built already, but while the concept is feasible, this new modular design introduces some problems in reality. You could theoretically take all the guts out of a smartphone and make them modular, because they already start off as individual parts. However, creating enclosures and universal plugs for each piece would make your device much bigger than pocket size and more expensive as well. Also, don’t drop it – otherwise you’ll have a phone split in more pieces than just a cracked screen.

The idea of being able to take apart, fix and improve consumer electronics is enticing, and the phone has already caught the world’s attention with a “social reach” of nearly 250 billion people – but we’ll remain skeptical until it actually happens.