A View from the Exercise Ball

While doing some stretches, it occurred to me that the view of the ceiling in the next room had a kind of stark appearance. So I grabbed the camera and took a picture from the same vantage point.


The winter here in Wisconsin has been especially bad for outdoor biking, so all of my miles, so far this year, have been indoors. Also, my blogging has been mostly quick posts to twitter, either directly or via Dailymile.com, while logging my training. This week I move into intervals of longer duration and change ups on the weekend with a long ride (2-3 hours).

My next project is going to be to build another camera mount for a bicycle (like the steadicam arm) and I plan to give it away. Details coming in future posts.

Shameless promotion

I'm asking for votes, for my Instructables projects, to get either of them into the upcoming O'Reilly "Best of Instructables" book. All you have to do is just go to either of these Instructables links; Picoo-Z project or Steadicam bike mount project, login and then click the button labeled:

[vote now!]

That's it for now.

Busy May

It's been a busy month, my daughter graduated from College, so we made the pilgrimage to Minnesota 2 weeks ago for the graduation ceremony. Then a trip to Illinois the following weekend for a party with the family.

I also managed to get a fair amount of bike riding in as well. The breakfast ride has become one of my favorites (having a break where you get to eat pancakes or French toast is a nice change from the weekday rides). My mileage total for the the year, so far, is ~1065 miles.

I'm also in the process of putting my steadicam mount to good use and maybe even make a little money with it.

Bicycle Steadicam arm completed

I just finished and published my instructable project that details the construction of the bike mounted steadicam. So far the two test rides that I've done with this version have shown a big improvement over the previous version.

Breakfast Ride using steadicam mount

Here's a short Clip that I shot using my bike Steadicam mount.

Completed Steadicam mount

Here's a quick picture of the completed bicycle steadicam mount. I'm finishing up the instructables project documentation and I want to get a test ride taped (if the rain lets up).

Success with the steadicam mount

Last night I finally completed the modifications to my bike mounted steadicam arm. Each iso-elastic section has it's own hydraulic shock absorber, to dampen the vibration I was encountering. It involved a few strange combinations of parts, like grease zerk fittings and screen door parts. Pictures and the completed instructables project will follow in a day or two.

The weather is looking good for the Spinners Tuesday night ride tonight.

Safe riding all.

Stuck on my current project

My update of the bike mounted steadicam arm is stuck at present. I'm still looking for a way to mount the RC shock absorbers to the inside of each iso-elastic arm. I may have to custom build/modify some existing mounting bracket from the RC world, but I was trying to keep this project as inexpensive as possible, and the RC parts are pricey. The set of two shock absorbers alone, were ~$20. I'm hoping to get something done with it this week/weekend, since the weather doesn't seem to be cooperating with bike riding. My plan is to find some bolts or screws with a large enough heads to cut a slot, for the ends of the shock to be mounted, and drill holes to allow for a pin or small screw to pass through, to hold the ends of the shocks.

Training trip coming up

I'll be going to California soon, for some training. I can't say that it won't be nice to get away from the cold weather that we have been having lately, but something always seems to happen back home while I'm gone. (and it usually costs me money). Here's an example: A little over two years ago I was at Solaris 10 training in San Jose and I got a call from home, something was wrong with the boiler of our hydronic heating system.















Specifically, it was the a broken spring on the interface between the motor and the pump that circulates the heated water. I knew what was wrong from the description, but I'm ~2000 miles away. So my wife has to call a repair service and what would have been an hour of my time and a $10 part turns into a ~$600.oo repair bill.

I'm almost over my head cold, so I've been back on my bike trainer. While I'm gone I'm going to take my bike to a local shop (http://transitioncycle.com) and have it cleaned up and checked out for the upcoming season.

Last thing, I've been working on updating my Instructables project related to the steadicam mount and I'm working on a new modification at the same time. One of the people who commented on the project suggested that I use RC (Radio Controlled) car parts (shocks) to dampen the vibration. I'm looking into that for the update to the project, so that and the training trip is going to delay the posting of the project by a couple of weeks at least.

Update on some previous posts

The http://becomeanmm.com site has some updates (or maybe options I didn't notice the first time), so I updated my m&m avatar.




Also, I've been getting some email with questions regarding the updated version of my steadicam bicycle mount. So within the next week or so I should have a new Instructables project posted with all the details plus some of the video that I shot over the summer.



Bicycle training progress. I mentioned before that I've been tracking my indoor cycling (on the trainer) on the POLAR website. Here's my 1st month progress report from their website (click on it for a larger view).

Updating my Steadicam mount

The steadi-cam mount for my bike has gone through several modifications since I first documented it in my Instructable's project. The Intro step of the project shows version 1.0, then step 10 shows the 2.0 version and there are hints (drawing in step 10) of how it would finally evolve over the summer. Here's the current version, with a tripod mount on the end of the arm, with it I can mount the DV camera in any position, (360 degree horizontal view, and about 180 degrees along the vertical axis). This photo show a view of the camera end of the arm (the tripod mount, counter weight, hinges and dampeners).




















For regular use, I covered the mechanism with an old arm warmer, as seen in the second photo.

I used the camera mount over the summer to tape several rides and and then transferred them to DVD. In the winter months I've been using the DVDs as motivation while I ride inside on my trainer.

Google ad targets

It's interesting to see what Adsense picks up on in blog posting when deciding what ad(s) to place. For instance my recent Sci-Fi Friday mentions an exhibit hall, so naturally an ad about exihibit hall displays is posted. Not exactly my target audience, but then it got me thinking, who is my target audience? Some of what I post is biking related, but I don't make it the only topic. I document some of what I do; either at work, hobbies and observations. I like to show my creative side, that's why I like the Instructables site, which by the way is where I need to update or create a new posting for my Steadicam (bike mounted). It's gone through some changes since that first version that I documented, I've added a tripod head at the end of the arm so that I can swivel the miniDV 360 degrees and tilt it +/- ~90 degrees. I'll probably get a picture of it up here before I get the update on Instructables. So, it will be interesting to see what Adsense does with this posting.

Safe riding all -
The Ride Lead