Dashbrain

Starting to assemble parts for a set of wheels to train on with a Powertap. That’s going to be a huge step forward for the project. Sorry I’ve been pretty sparse on updates — life has been tough lately.

Due to an emergency veterinarian visit yesterday/today, the Dashbrain project is going to be delayed for a bit. More updates as soon as possible.

So after the recent discovery that the iPhone SDK 3.0 will allow you to talk to the serial port portion of the Dock Connector Cable, I’ve had to do some soul-searching about the direction of this project.

Ultimately, I had to decide whether or not to tie Dashbrain to the iPhone. In order to stay as true to the open nature of the project as possible, I’ve come up with the following solution.

Read more…

So there’s not much to report on the project. Kate was home for the weekend and I had my Sunday shift at the bike shop, thus nothing really got addressed with Dashbrain. Next weekend I’ll be traveling for Memorial Day weekend, so I suspect that at the most what I’ll do is write some code for the thing while I’m on the plane.

I did contemplate a hardware revision/variant that would replace the cell module with an iPhone cable. It’ll require writing an iPhone app to listen to the data from that cable.

Still need to get ahold of a PowerTap hub or two (wireless ANT+Sport compatible, of course). Anyone know anyone at CycleOps that might convince them to donate an SL+ and a PRO+ to my endeavors? (Exact specs would be something to be discussed.) I’ve already gone through the training at 3point5 (something for bike shop employees) and can e.p. them — but that’s still too rich for my blood right now.

In exchange for the donation, I’d be happy to continue to advocate for the use of the PowerTap, and would happily list them as my “title sponsor” on the site, to include one of the 125×125 spots in the right-hand column, and a banner in the header block of the site.

Let me know. I’ll be following this post up later today with information about my sponsorship needs.

I just updated the About page to give a little more background on the project and what I intend to do with it.

So, welcome to the Dashbrain site. I’ll be updating this blog over the course of building and refining the Dashbrain project. (See “About” for more.)

To give you an idea where I am in the project — I’ve got the idea and a few pages of notes scribbled in a Moleskine. There’s a Garmin Edge 705 on my bike. I’ve got the Arduino board already in-hand and have been experimenting with it. The ANT+Sport transceiver is in the mail and should be here today.

This weekend, I’ll be doing some light soldering work and will be starting the first phase of the project — getting an LED to blink in-time with my heartbeat.