Meet the bike that tweets for charity

Brainy Bike Will Tweet Its Feelings

by John Biggs on August 10, 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb1UwQfeZIk&w=500&h=417]

Meet Precious. Precious will ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Tweeting his stats along the way and making assessments over time including comments on the weather, hilliness of the terrain, and speed. Why? Because it can.

You can follow the old boy over here and he and his riders are raising money for Livestrong. You can donate here.

Here’s how they describe it:

To gather all of the data from the bike, we developed a device to capture temperature, humidity, grade, speed, cadence (pedal rotation), direction and GPS. The device takes several readings from each sensor, then sends the average values via text message using a cellular module. We utilized the Twitter API to receive and parse the text messages, which are then analyzed by our servers. In order to preserve battery life (we get 35+ hours on a single charge), the device wakes itself up every 5 minutes to check readings and submit data. The rider can also hit a button on the handlebars to trigger the device to report the data for that exact moment.

Generally, it’s a fun test of telemetrics and Internet broadcasting and looks like it’s for a good cause. They’re probably going to hit the West Coast in a month or two, so keep your eye on them.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/10/brainy-bike-will-tweet-its-feelings/