danr
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Notes From the BikeLab #15 (500 lines LONG!)
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Mar 31 23:39 UTC 1992 |
Steve Roberts' experiment cuts across so many lines, I wasn't
sure which conference it should go in. I guess this is as good a
place as any.
Roberts is the guy who decided to try to make his living by
writing articles with a portable computer while cycling around
the country. He parlayed this adventure into a book deal and
several corporate sponsorships to develop and test bike stuff and
portable computer/communications stuff.
As you will note when you read this his "bike" now sports a
cellular telephone, a ham radio station, and computers.
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NOTES FROM THE BIKELAB
Issue #15 -- 3/29/92
by Steven K. Roberts
---------------------------
Copyright (C) 1992 by Steven K. Roberts. All Rights Reserved.
(Intact reposting and free distribution is OK with permission;
personal forwarding is OK without.)
IN THIS ISSUE:
High-tech Nomadness Returns!
The Mother of All Layovers
The Mothership
BEHEMOTH Technical Update
CELLULAR PHONE
HAM STATION
PNEUMATICS
FORTH DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM and MAC STATUS
UNIXCYCLE
HP-95LX PALMTOP
"I'd rather be lucky than talented. Luck doesn't take any work."
-- Dave Berkstresser, who never fails to come up
with a quotable line in the middle of a pizza.
I keep getting glimpses of it: sometimes in the images called
forth by the music of my life, flashes of the Road encoded in the
CDs of my favorite travelin' jams. Sometimes the reminders lurk
in the smoldering eyes of a new friend, recalling the romance of
beginnings, the magic of new places. If I'm sensitive, it takes
but a sunny day and a passing bicycle; if I'm stressed, I have to
get hit on the head by the poignancy of old writings or the
intensity of new passions before I remember why I am. But
always, somewhere below the surface, is the wanderlust -- the
ache for freedom. Strip away all the high tech and business
clutter, and you'll find me deep in love, still, with the Other
Woman... The Road. She's easy to take for granted, yet so potent
in her effects that handling a tattered old road map can bring
tears to my eyes.
It's happening again at last. Friends have watched patiently for
three and a half years, some helping with the project, others
just asking in that quiet way if I'm ever going to travel again
-- their voices taking on the sort of tenderness associated with
hesitant questions about relationships in transition. This whole
Silicon Valley "layover," nearly as long as my internment in Ohio
suburbia, seems to have been one great inhalation: now,
blue-faced, I strain toward the moment of release in a sort of
eager panic. On April 15, I shut the door of the Sun bikelab one
last time and return to the road at last... full-time.
But things are different, this trip.
Road lust takes many forms, and I seem to experience most of
them. You must understand: it's passage away from HERE that is
the lure -- and not necessarily any particular HERE. Just HERE:
wherever comfort has degenerated into complacency. (Oh yes, I've
had some sweet layovers indeed -- homes so lovely and warm that
my wanderlust seems perverted.) But when restlessness grips you
it cares nothing for your degree of comfort, only for the
instinctive desire to GO... the innate quest for change.
Sound familiar?
This story is a watershed. For 3.5 years (!) I have been in the
Silicon Valley area, taking a break from full-time travel to
build the new bike. Of course it's not finished -- it probably
never will be -- but it is now far enough along that further
development can take place on the road, away from the milling
machine and Deep Clutter. And there now really is a nomadic
research lab to justify my company name. But since so much time
has elapsed since my previous reports, I think a quick timeline
summary is in order before I tell you about what's happening
now...
The Mother of All Layovers
--------------------------
This all began in 1983, when the torpor of midwest suburbia
became too oppressive, the concept of growing up had been exposed
as a farce, and it occurred to me that a lifelong quest for
passion was not such a bad idea after all. I built the Winnebiko
and traveled solo for about 10,000 miles, taking me into 1985.
It was to have been only a short layover, but my Computing Across
America book became ensnarled in the sleazy nightmares of the
publishing business and I ran out of money. In Ohio I built the
Winnebiko II and fell in love with Maggie... we hit the road
together in 1986, taking a year and a half to pedal our
recumbents 6,000 miles on both coasts. In early 1988 we hit
Florida: my book finally came out, and we bought a 35-foot
school bus to haul inventory around the country on the tradeshow
circuit, living hand to mouth on book sales.
About 300 cubic feet of gasoline later, we rumbled into the San
Francisco Bay area. It was the fall of 1988... and the plan was
to find a place to spend a year building the new bike, then dump
the bus and hit the road again. But this was a seriously
ambitious project, and I underestimated it by about 75%.
We spent six months in Palo Alto, working in Alan Selfridge's
ping-pong room. Six months in Milpitas, sharing a rented house
with Dave Berkstresser, designing circuitry in the livingroom and
hacking fiberglass on the rear deck. Six months with Roger
Grigsby in Santa Cruz, working in tiny bedrooms and a funky
garage, doing the console metalwork and mounting boards. Then we
languished happily for nearly a year in Soquel, renting a house
with Dave Wright, working in space donated by Borland
International and then moving back to the house -- sweating over
a desk in the school bus and puttering about in another dusty
garage, feeling way too much like a homeowner clinging to the
obsolete hobbies of youth. And then at last the breakthrough: a
year and a half in a 1200 square foot lab provided by Sun
Microsystems in Mountain View.
As lifestyles go, I cannot really recommend round-the-clock
presence in a windowless fluorescent-lit corporate environment.
But the resources have been first class, the company supportive,
and the people stimulating. The project moved steadily along.
Machines flickered to life, wizard friends started spent late
evenings here running cables, machining, writing FORTH code,
building boards, tweaking gears, running the CAD system, hacking
the unixcycle, brainstorming... and it even began to seem that I
would in fact get to pedal this thing again someday. In the
summer of '91 I trucked it to Iowa for an aborted attempt at
RAGBRAI (blew a hub the first day), then proceeded more slowly on
a test ride through Illinois, Wisconsin, and the upper peninsula
of Michigan.
It was quite a reality check -- in some ways thrilling, in others
frustrating. Bike mechanical components were quickly proven to
be the weak link, with the freewheel serving as the fuse in my
drivetrain when I pushed too hard one afternoon on a hilly
section of the Fox River Trail. Gravity was now more of a factor
than ever before, with 780 pounds of stuff (including my body) to
haul up every hill -- although active helmet cooling, a 105-speed
geartrain, and pneumatically deployed landing gear helped take
the sting out. But the brakes were inadequate, and in a curious
way the computers were a pain because most of the on-board
systems were yet unconnected and unprogrammed. Halfway up a
killer Wisconsin hill on a 97-degree summer day, the words "dead
weight" take on a sinister tone... more than once did I
contemplate leaving a trail of useless gizmology in the ditch and
breezing happily into the sunset.
But I managed to avoid that temptation, and in Lansing an
interesting alternative presented itself: the mothership. The
triggering event was the purchase of six Japanese books to
support my language study -- when the time came to pack the bike
and pedal off to Ann Arbor and points south, BEHEMOTH's trailer
lid wouldn't close. Aw hell. This got me thinking about the
convoluted nature of this business, the other motives in my life,
and the need to rapidly relocate the bike to trade shows,
speaking gigs, interesting layover environments, and client sites
(I had spent over $3,000 on rental trucks in the previous year).
Within a few days, I was the owner of a GMC van and a 20-foot
Wells Cargo trailer.
Zooming back to the lab for the final phase, I threw myself into
the project once again... fighting the torpor of endless TO-DO
lists, living a reminder of all the reasons I want to travel.
Stress. Deadlines. Biz. The endless sameness of days spent in
physical stasis, watching the contents of hard disks change to
reflect the latest details of my life but otherwise experiencing
time's inexorable passage with growing impatience. But now, as I
write this at the beginning of April 1992, I realize that I'm at
the beginning of a whole new adventure, as unprepared as ever but
deeply excited and anxious to get on with it.
So what's all this mothership business? Am I about to betray my
human-powered roots and become an industrial-strength RV'er?
Steve Sergeant commented in the technomads alias that, "it was
like the day the music died for me when Steve Roberts announced
he was becoming a MOTORIST." Time to explain...
The Mothership
--------------
One nice thing about having this lab at Sun is that it can
support a lot of interesting projects that are impossible when
living full-time on a bicycle. I have inventory, robust tools,
and workspace. The cost, of course, is that I am immobile.
Since the bike is an ongoing development project, I really do
need workspace -- and finding it on the fly while passing through
an unfamiliar town can be extremely time-consuming. Quite
simply, the mothership is a way to have the best of both worlds:
a workspace that can be relocated on demand, serving as a mobile
home base for a succession of shorter bicycle tours. This may
seem to take something away from the grand adventure of
open-ended bicycle travel, but it more than compensates by adding
a layer of tools that render the entire project more flexible and
intellectually stimulating (like allowing major book projects,
consulting gigs, and system upgrades without requiring a year's
layover!).
It also adds another feature: rapid deployment to places I would
otherwise avoid (cities). This becomes significant when dealing
with the business side of this (um, you didn't think that
publishing the journal is my sole source of income, did you?) --
I'm now working with a speakers bureau (Keynote Speakers),
appearing at trade shows, and doing a bit of consulting here and
there -- some on-site, some nomadic.
OK, so much for the quickie justification. Now lemme tellya
about the mothership!
This is becoming a serious toy. It's happening in two stages:
the current system, a 20' trailer and an inadequate van, needs to
be replaced. I can't do this all at once without eliciting
polite chuckles from bankers, so I'm trading the van for a robust
truck and pressing on with the mobile bikelab... assuming that
in a few months I'll upgrade the latter to a 44' Wells Cargo
fifth wheel. These are not at all like RV's, fortunately -- I
researched those in some detail and discovered that a huge
percentage of their not-inconsiderable cost is attributable to
the implementation of someone else's idea of "home." But I need
a machine shop, bikelab, R&D environment, inventory area, office,
and -- oh yeah -- a place to sleep and perform body-maintenance
tasks. The Wells Cargo products should be investigated by any
nomad who needs to define custom space... they build everything
from empty boxes on wheels to concession wagons, auto carriers
(like the racing teams use), mobile offices, and research
vehicles. (The company is at 800-348-7553.)
My 20-footer has been configured with a suite of surplus
workbenches and office furniture, occupying the entire left side
and front end. Parts inventory lives in 500 tiny drawers and 32
Rubbermaid bins in a custom shelving unit. The bike lives on the
right side, tied down with ratchet straps, and can be removed via
a ramp stowed under the trailer (the big one will have a
fold-down ramp door). A small solar panel is on the roof to keep
the local battery (and the bike system) charged, and I've remoted
the bike's cellular and pager antennas via an umbilicus. A phone
line from the bike's CelJack cellular phone interface runs all
the way to the driver's seat, where a cordless phone with
answering machine is velcro'd to the ham equipment rack. There's
a long way to go -- this one will take care of the trip beginning
on April 15, but the full project is much more ambitious (of
course). I'll tell you about it in detail as it develops, but
suffice it to say that it will become a complete autonomous
climate-controlled mobile lab, linked full-time to the internet,
networked to the bike, and equipped with a full range of
mechanical, electronic, and software development tools.
The current trip begins April 15 after a talk at the Idea '92
conference, then takes me to Reno for a gig at the local ACM
chapter. Then I zoom cross-country with visits in Utah and
Colorado, arriving in Dayton just in time for the annual hamfest
(the big one) -- where I'll display the bike in the PacComm booth
and speak at the Icom FM bash. >From there, I loop through
Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Richmond for a round of
visits, then make my way to Washington DC for the Interop show in
mid-May. Here, we'll demonstrate the bike's internetworking
features (um, that is... whatever is working by then!) and do an
interview with NPR's "All Things Considered," then, well, from
there it gets vague. I'll be back in Silicon Valley by October,
probably long before, to implement the big trailer and hit the
road once again. Hopefully, somewhere after Interop there will
be time for a liesurely bike tour around Utah.
Yes, all this business stuff is the substrate that keeps me
alive, but as I plan these mothership excursions the key thing is
to leave large holes in my schedule to accommodate adventures
more satisfying than the quest for 60-foot parking spaces in
unfamiliar cities. The bike is still the focus of the whole
affair, and even though it's networked with mothership and
backpack in a multilayered nomadic system, it still comes into
its own when it's out on the road, lumbering along under human
power, computing and communicating on the captured energy of
sunlight. As this journal continues to evolve in both print and
electronic forms, the spirit of BEHEMOTH will remain the focus --
even as we diverge into all sorts of related tools and techniques
that apply to a wide range of nomadic needs.
As always, I invite your comments and questions, and I'm still
looking for interesting people who might want to become involved
on the road or with joint-venture projects!
BEHEMOTH Technical Update
-------------------------
Deadlines are amazing things. I can mess around for months,
taking up my time with schmoozing, planning, scheming, and
reshuffling, never seeming to make any real headway. Then a
departure date looms and the project shifts into focus, help
materializes, and things get knocked off the TODO list at the
rate of 3 or 4 a day. Here's what's been going on with the
bike...
CELLULAR PHONE
The cellular phone is now alive and in use whenever I'm pedaling
or driving the mothership -- and the key component is the CelJack
from Telular (800-TELULAR for info; contact Jeannette Franson).
This unit lives between the handset and the transceiver of my Oki
491 phone, and provides a completely standard RJ-11 modular jack
interface. It has the look and feel of a normal phone line:
plug in a desk phone, call the bike, and the bell rings.
The wonderful thing about this is that all sorts of devices that
were not designed to work on cellular phones now work just fine.
I run the line around the bike (and off-bike as well), and have
used it with the Touchbase 2496 fax/modem, the Telebit
CellBlazer, the Panasonic cordless phone with answering machine
that's now velcro'd under the fairing, and -- most twisted of all
-- the credit card terminal. That's right... in Seattle last
month, I met a guy on the street who subscribed to the journal --
I just took his plastic and did the transaction on the spot.
Ain't technology wonderful?
Of course, I still think the cellular industry itself is full of
serious bugs. The fact that a 576-page "Cellular Telephone
Directory" is a necessary adjunct to full-time roaming is absurd.
This is an appliance, and should feel like one. Unfortunately,
every vendor of airtime has a better way to do things, and none
of them are either compatible or obvious to the user. The
concepts of online help and consistent user interface have
obviously never occurred to them.
HAM STATION
I've interfaced the CMOS Super Keyer with the Bencher paddle and
the Icom 725, and it works beautifully. Performance of the HF
system continues to amaze me: good DX is now quite routine. I
worked a station in China during a photo session last week.
Things are still not ready for integrated bicycle mobile
operation, but Joe Dunn built the last two audio crosspoint
boards and Dave Harris is continuing to weave all the cabling
into a completed network. Software power control is working fine,
and the whole thing is finally starting to feel like a system.
PacComm just sent their delightful new Handi-Packet unit -- a
tiny full-function TNC that comes with a belt clip and internal
12-hour NiCd battery. This is literally plug-and-play: I
plugged the provided cables into my HP-95LX palmtop and Icom
IC-24 transceiver, and it worked. It has KISS mode and an
internal mini-BBS as well. A complete packet system in a fanny
pack or briefcase is now essentially off-the-shelf technology...
and don't forget that a number of packet-to- internet gateways
are now online. Things keep getting more and more
interesting.... (PacComm is at 813-874-2980.)
On the ham radio theme, I apparently agreed in a weak moment to
appear at the Dayton Hamfest this year -- I'll have the bike in
the PacComm booth and speaking Friday night at the Icom FM Bash.
If you're there, come say hello!
PNEUMATICS
I did it. My arm kept getting tired from pumping up the air tank
for the pneumatic landing gear and the horn -- there's a slow
leak I just can't seem to track down. The bike now has a small
compressor that converts photons into air pressure. It's the
little things that add up....
FORTH DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM and MAC STATUS
More progress on the bicycle control system! Thanks to Mike
Perry's expert help, the whole development environment for FORTH
is now in the console Mac -- using the slick script language
that's part of Microphone II. It's now so quick and easy to hack
code that I really want to finish this update so I can get back
to it. HyperTalk will still be the graphic user interface during
normal operation, but we found that using it to manage all the
handshaking of program downloads was, well, let's just say a bit
too liesurely to be effective.
The other Macintosh news is that the handlebar keyboard is at
last alive. Jay Hamlin and the folks at Infogrip have completed
a Mac version of the BAT chord keyboard, and we wired the
processor onto the BCP's nexus board. Now I have no excuse for
putting off the learning curve on the new chording scheme... I
can finally type while riding again!
The mouse is another matter -- the ultrasonic head mouse from
Personics just isn't doing the job. Apparently, the problem is
no fault of the manufacturer -- Steve Sergeant probed around in
the circuit and noticed serious phase jitter coming from the
sensors on my helmet. We've concluded that this is a result of
excessive cable length and EMI from the BCP, and Steve wants to
try adding filtration. I've been playing with Logitech's amazing
new 6D ultrasonic mouse, but it may be overkill for the
application -- I'm about to try (hopefully) the new gyroscopic
unit from Gyration. This would let me send high-level quadrature
from the helmet instead of tiny analog signals, eliminating the
negative effects of a long wiring harness and road noise.
UNIXCYCLE
The bike's SPARCstation has been a major issue for quite a while,
and it is now alive on the bench with a monochrome display from
RDI. I also just acquired the new Sharp TFT active matrix color
LCD, which is dramatically beutiful -- as well as an RDI SBUS
card to control it. All this was intended to replace the 286
system in the console.
But that involves major mechanical surgery, so an interim
solution is now underway with the help of a group of engineers
here at Sun. We're building the SPARC into the Zero aluminum
case (with solar panel) that rides atop the bike's RUMP. This
system has 424 Megabytes of disk, both screens packaged in a
folding two-headed windowing environment, the new 9600-baud
Motorola Radius wireless modem, kayboard, trackball, and external
ports for CDROM, serial comm, ethernet, and floppy. It's not
quite the same as being able to run it while pedaling, but in all
fairness, this system is more for the heavy-duty computing tasks
like high-speed daily internet mail transfers, still video,
mapping, and CAD -- not on-the-road text editing and routine
satellite and RF data communication. It won't kill me to stop
and open a pack, I guess. ;-)
The only problem with this approach is that it displaces office
stuff that lived in that case... but that can all move to the
trailer and displace the now-obsolete DOS laptop (the SPARC can
emulate DOS, and I still have the Ampro core module system
running the Private Eye).
HP-95LX PALMTOP
Finally, my favorite new personal accessory is the HP-95 palmtop,
which is the first pocket computer that I've found useful enough
to want with me 24 hours a day. I don't have the space here for
a full review, but I've gotta tellya -- they did a beautiful job.
It's easily interfaceable via serial or infrared link, accepts
the PCMCIA cards, and has a whole suite of useful applications in
ROM: filer, communications, appointment manager, address book
database, text editor, Lotus 123, and a robust scientific
calculator with solver. These can all coexist and hot-key back
and forth, meaning that you don't have to close one operation to
deal with another. You can shell to DOS if you like. And new
applications can be installed... like a full dictionary and the
Mobile Data Link.
MDL is magic. I keep the 95 in a cradle that also carries the
Motorola NewsStream pager (stylistically compatible). There's a
serial link between them, and the pager is on a national Skypage
account. Now, if someone wants to send email to my pocket, it can
be done by logging on to 800-SKYWORD and entering my PIN... or
just using an internet gateway that automates the process. By
prefacing message text with special codes, items can be added to
my TO-DO list, appointment book, 123 spreadsheets, etc. A friend
at HP gets hourly stock quotes this way.
Of course, this is receive only... but that's a temporary
limitation. I had a chance to see the Mobidem, which plugs into
the 95 and provides a BIDIRECTIONAL email link via radio. I'll
keep you posted...
That's all for now -- back to work! Next time you hear from me,
it will be from somewhere Out There. Now that I'm wandering
again, I'm interested in speaking gigs and interesting adventure
or learning opportunities... See you on the road...
Cheers!
Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
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