Halfway through AIBD 2014!!!
I haven’t quite caught up with blog posts covering everything I’ve been
working on so far this year, but I wanted to start talking about our D-Lab
class adventures. It’s been awesome
running the class with Roberto this year, and the students have some nice
projects starting to take shape. We've got a recumbent, swing bike, shopping cart bike, batman bike, and a bike-powered electronics charging station! Check
out the official class blog here: http://aibd.mit.edu/
Since I didn’t have enough bike projects going on yet,
Roberto and I also added another one to get pumped about.
Sometimes it seems like all I do is get started on more projects to add to the stuff I’m already working on, and it seems like nothing gets finished….but hey,
we still have 2 more free weeks to get it all done before the semester starts!
Our new design is a flywheel bike, which opens up a lot of
new options and ideas to work with. The
lecture yesterday focused on the internal and external forces on a bicycle, and concluded with a brief intro to flywheels. The last thing we showed was this video, and it was a cool design for a bike that Roberto's been talking about for a while now:
youtube: redditvideos3
The basic idea is a sort of mechanical form of regenerative braking, so that when the bike slows down or stops, the energy is stored in the heavy, spinning flywheel. Then, when you start moving again, you can use that energy to get back up to speed.
I guess the grand vision right now for the idea is having a bike we can pedal while we're stopped in order to 'charge up' the flywheel, and then burn rubber off the start (as opposed to when braking) and have some crazy bicycle drag races. We would have the rider pedal to turn the flywheel (on a freewheel) and then have the flywheel linked back to the rear wheel. The design in the video implemented a continuously variable transmission in the hub, but we are instead looking into a clutch design similar to the power take off in a lawn mower so that we can control the braking and starting of the bike. I've got some extra bike frames stored away in the room, so we'll see if we can get something mocked up soon.
I guess the grand vision right now for the idea is having a bike we can pedal while we're stopped in order to 'charge up' the flywheel, and then burn rubber off the start (as opposed to when braking) and have some crazy bicycle drag races. We would have the rider pedal to turn the flywheel (on a freewheel) and then have the flywheel linked back to the rear wheel. The design in the video implemented a continuously variable transmission in the hub, but we are instead looking into a clutch design similar to the power take off in a lawn mower so that we can control the braking and starting of the bike. I've got some extra bike frames stored away in the room, so we'll see if we can get something mocked up soon.
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