Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Denny the Urban Bike”.
I’M nathan with make and i’m here with matt and john uh – why don’t you guys introduce yourselves hi, i’m john mabry and i’m a designer at teague hi, matt uh, head of studio at teague, and what did you bring here today to makercon? We brought our uh denny bike, basically an updated version of a bike that won a uh organ, manifest competition last year. Uh so tell me a little bit more about the bike. What’S uh, what’s special about it, if you could just take off a few things, the the goal of the competition originally was to redesign or design a bike uh for the the modern urban landscape, our uh. Our approach was to try to make a experience that gets people out of cars and on the bikes and uh. So what we tried to do is mirror a lot of the experience that people would normally have in a car to a bike. And what are some of the design factors that you included to do that? So it included a lot of automatic features like power, assist functions, automatic transmission, automatic lights and integrated, locking solutions, we’re trying to make sure that the the bike feels like something that it’s secured. It’S safe to ride and it provides enough conveniences where people are going to choose it over perhaps commuting by car and okay.
Tell me about the brain: what’s uh, what’s the brain of this bike got going on so we’re currently using intel’s edison uh microcontroller? I guess you’d call it a microcontroller, and that is basically the like. You described, that’s the brain of the bike, that’s controlling all of our our lighting systems, uh all of our uh kind of our metric tracking systems. We have a bunch of sensors on the bike that are measuring how hard you’re pedaling, how fast you’re going where you are at, and it’s sort of keeping track of all those different different setups, so that we can feed that back into a connected app. I think it provides a core interface to the bike.
You know traditionally bikes haven’t. Had you know a brain, we don’t have a you know, you haven’t had a website for your bike, and so we asked ourselves. What can you do with a website when you have for a bike, and you can look at any of the data logging any of where you are you can remote unlock or lock it? You can figure out where your bike is. The bike has a bluetooth lock for the handlebar, and so you can control all that through the interface and that’s what the edison actually provides um and run me down. The electric assist part that is uh.
You’Ve got a separate battery for that yeah. So there’s two main power systems on the bike one is: is for the electric assist um, that’s our high voltage system and one is our low voltage and that’s that’s for all of our critical systems, including edison, and all the lighting on the bike. The low power system is recharged uh via a built-in dyno in the front hub, so that system is always active.
You never have to worry about any kind of a battery recharge. For that the big battery, though we can’t recharge off of that system. So that is a better full battery pack that will get you about 25 minutes of active run time, which is enough to get you to work on an average day. So that part is separate, but we do provide a removable battery pack, so you can take that in to your home or your office and charge it there. While the bike stays locked up outside, we worked with sram using their new, auto shifting, e-assist hub and so originally as part of the competition. We had an e-assist hub and we had a the auto shifting hub sort of two different ones and we’ve been working with sram to actually bring in their combined one, which has a torque sensor inside.
So, as you start pedaling a little harder, it automatically downshifts kicks in the ess, and so you actually have that power. When you need it – and i understand you used some 3d printing in this project too. Could you tell me how and where yeah so the original prototype we used a number of different fabrication techniques, including 3d printed metal or laser-centered metal? We did that for some of the more organic shapes that are on the bike, because it was the quickest fastest sort of cheapest way to get there um, and it provides a level of just a bit more of an organic look to the bike that we couldn’t Have normally been able to achieve? Otherwise, i think without the expensive, tooling of hydroforming, something that we didn’t have access to for building the bike. We were able to 3d print the parts and then weld up sort of stock tubing.
Uh to that and so working with a bike manufacturer, uh, seismo bikes in seattle, we were able to actually get the bike produced for the competition within a good budget. So so, what’s next for denny, the bike well, denny uh denny is in in swing for production right now, we’re working with fuji bikes on that and we’re actually working with a number of uh through a number of details on the bike that are going to be A little bit of a challenge for them to do in in production and we’re showing off a few of those solutions here at maker faire that are taking the original prototype from what was essentially a one-off. You know bike and helping to make it more of a production ready. Well, i’m really! Sorry, you didn’t bring any pedals, because i would have loved to have taken it for a spin .