Aug/071
Day 1 starts well
Location: Speyer.
Distance since last post. Approx 30km
Temp. 25 C
Weather. Blue skies!
Awake at 0730 after a really good sleep and a horrible dream that when I got out of my tent I was in an empty campsite…with no bike. Packing up camp took a bit longer then expected mainly due to the dampness of everything and the fact that I usually get up at 0900 and not 0730. I also had to deal with about 10 mosquito bites. Damn they are annoying. On the road at about 0915.
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At 10:45 this morning I pulled off the path and set up the solar panel for the first time. I haven’t actually tested it with the frame yet because I only finished building the frame a day before the tour but with a few strips of velcro it folds back on itself nicely and stays well in place. Its a pain to be getting things out of the panniers all the time though.
There are literally hundreds of bikes out today. The route is well ridden and of course, its Sunday. Everyone seems happy and friendly. I chatted to a couple of bikers at a train crossing and then, 30 minutes later they passed me in the opposite direction waving and wishing me a happy journey. That really helps make it more enjoyable.
I’m riding at about 20km/h on the bike which is a steady, but certainly not fast pace. Taking into account stops I think I must average about 15km/h while riding which means 3-3.5hours riding per day. I think that will fit nicely into the plan of a morning and late afternoon ride.
The Q1b is working well here on a table in a biergarten. I was worried about the screen not being bright enough but in there shade there’s no problem.
Now its time to catch up on emails, RSS feeds. See you at the next campsite.
Aug/073
First UMPC camp. Day 0.
I made it down to Karlsruhe in Germany after a quite stressful train journey with the bike and all the kit and after a short journey that turned out to be a 2.5hours trek to the campsite. I just managed to get the tent up before it got dark and I had to dive straight into the tent though because there are thousands of hungry mosquitos here.
After spending an hour trying to organise my kit inside my one-man tent (I gave up) I finally settled down with the local radio playing on the mobile phone and the Q1b lit by my USB led lamp. How nice!
The campsite here is terrible. It’s right next to a factory and full of drunk people. In front of me is someone trying to play the bongos and to the right of me is a family having an argument. Mmmm. I hope it gets better than this!
Tomorrow will be the first test of the Solar kit. Will it work? Will I be sitting in my tent tomorrow evening surfing the net and writing journal entries or will I be playing cards?
Aug/070
Tour day-plan.
Planning a busman’s holiday around the weather isn’t that easy. Camp set-up and break down, cycling between locations, working, keeping an eye on the weather, finding suitable places to work and charging power sources all need to be thought about. The key to success here (in our wonderfully changeable weather system) is to be flexible between 10:00 and 16:00 when there’s a possibility to get something out of the sun. Outside these hours there isn’t enough power in the sunlight to make it worth any effort or planning.
The original plan was to cycle during the day with the solar panel across the back of the bike however, a 25W panel is too big to lay in a useful, efficient position across the back of the bike so either I suffer with 50% energy loss or I stop when the sun shines. Having thought about it for about 2 seconds I think the latter idea is rather good and in fact, the objective of the tour is not to cycle as far as possible, its to test and learn about how UMPCs can be used and powered in mobile situations.
A rough dry-day plan could go like this.
- 0730-0830 wake up. Check email/RSS, Cuppa, Breakfast and pack up.
- 0845-1100 on the road for a concentrated 40km ride. Panel 50% deployed on bike but not expecting any usable power at this time of day.
- 1100-1600 Weather watch! If its sunny then stop and charge! Work, play, read, eat during this time. If not sunny try to get to campsite before midday in order to deploy trickle charge solution. Best charging period is 1200-1400 here.
- 1700-1900 If not already at campsite, set up tent. Find food. Shower. Food. Relax. Connect mobile phone and AA batteries for top-up from lead-acid battery.
- 1900-2100 Work (max 1.5 hours)
- 2100-2130 Prep for morning.
- 2200-2300 To bed with RSS, emails or book. Pray for sun! Earplugs in (camping by the Rhein is always noisy) and sleep…
Next job is to get the Google map started. I’m using RoboGeo to generate a live route map (here’s one I prepared earlier!) with images but I’d like to merge Google ‘My Map’ KML data with it so that I can build more than just a track map. If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know.
Update: I worked it out. You can create the My Map in Google Maps by doing the usual drag a nd drop, draw etc etc. Then export the KML. Uload the KML to your web server and add the following two red lines into your RoboGeo ‘map.htm’ file after the ‘var map’ line. Obviously you need to adjust the URL to point to the KML file you uploaded.
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(“map”));
var geoXml = new GGeoXml(“http://www.solar-
umpc.com/images/moblog-30-4-07/SolarUMPCTour.kml”);
map.addOverlay(geoXml);
Once you’ve done that, upload the RoboGeo dir to your server and link to the map.htm file.
Here’s one I’ve just made with a previous RoboGeo route and photos and if you zoom out you’ll see the start and endpoint for the tour and the current location of my bike. The great thing about it is that as you update your ‘My Map’ the created map changes too as it pulls in all the data from the Google servers. Wonderful!
I’m now off to do a bit of shopping. Packet soup, sultanas and muesli bars. Yum yum! create some maps!
Aug/072
Chocks away for the Solar UMPC Tour!
And that is about as good as its going to get I think. Time is running out fast and a good weather window is approaching. ‘Only’ 20-30% chance of rain. 6 hours of sun per day. 28th, 29th and 30th don’t look too fantastic but I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the risk. The Solar UMPC Tour is under starters orders!
After this blog post I will be emailing my PR contact at VIA Technologies and awaiting confirmation. I want to start on Sunday 26th of August and go through to 3rd Sept where I will finish on the Rheinufer (Rhein River promenade) in Duesseldorf and drink a huge Krystalweizen beer!
My decision was made only hours ago and I’ve just realised there’s a lot to do in 3 days. Posting frequency will be picking up here now so stay tuned!
Aug/072
Alternative energy for the tour.
Frank, another UMPC blogger found this…
He blogged about it here and called it a ‘European solution.’ He might be right because this year has been a terrible summer. My BBQ rate is down to once a week when it should be at least three times per week! A wind solution would need to be a lot bigger than this one though. According to the designers web page it takes 12 hours of wind to store enough power to charge a mobile phone. Mobile phones run on batteries of about 3 watt/hour. I’d get about 20 minutes of UMPC time per day with this version.
Frank. It might be easier for me to Fly over to Florida. You provide the tour Oranges OK?
Aug/070
9 days rain ahead.
I know that weather is supposed to be chaos but this is just silly. The most settled weather we’ve had this year was back in April and since then its been a real mess. It doesn’t look like it wants to change much either. The whole of central Europe is stuck in a mess of clouds that does not want to move and bizarrely, Helsinki, the place I’ve just come back from in northern (and generally colder) Europe is expecting a ton of sun!
Getting everything re-organised in another country is not something I really want to do to be honest. There’s a lot of cost and time issues that would make the project too much trouble for me and my sponsor, VIA Technologies so once again, I’m going to wait. The 9-day forecast takes me up to 18th August. After that point I have about 5 more weeks left in the summer before the sun gets too weak.
Aug/072
Solar UMPC Picnic
I took a long lunch break today for a solar UMPC picnic!
The Q1b was really difficult to see in the sunlight (as are all UMPCs) there but after a while, my eyes actually adjusted a bit and it was useable. The only problem is that you have to wind up the backlight which kills the battery life. I will have to be working in the shade on the tour.
Speaking of which, I’m still planning it. I mentioned before that the weather has been bad but its starting to look better now. I have to wait for my daughters 1st day of school on the 7th August and then I’m free to choose when to go.
One other thng to mention…A cool Solar Lamp that Kornel, one of the UMPCPortal team, sent me from his holiday. It works! Thanks Kornel. I’ll be taking it with me.
