Brett and Sarah Peterson won Nokia’s Push N900 “Mod in the USA” competition with his bike dashboard:
Way back in September I heard about the Nokia PUSH N900 global competition. I had been drooling over pictures and all the info I could find about the phone and thought, “Finally! This is my chance to get one!†I started brainstorming ideas.
I had recently built a fixie bike from a frame I found on craigslist (It’s awesome – green Japanese roadbike with some sort of Phoenix on one of the tubes), and various parts I bought from local bike shops. I really loved riding my bike everywhere I could! My wife Sarah and I would bike to the farmer’s market, out to eat, etc. I decided it would be awesome to have a kind of dashboard for my bike with info about the ride.
The way I approached this was to think of everything that I wanted in a dashboard, and then figure out what I thought was actually feasible. First, I knew I wanted some data. Speed and distance were a must; Cadence would be cool, but as a casual bike rider, not critical. I wanted a map showing the route we took. I wanted to have lights that I could control from the phone, a horn to honk back at cars that cut us off. I wanted to integrate the camera to quickly take pictures and maybe even have a video of the ride.
I started to sketch everything up in my Maker Notebook. I love this thing – graph paper is by far my favorite of the lined varieties and this has a great grid layout. Here’s my first design:
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