Bikelab Notes Archives - Page 2 of 2

The blur of late nights and frenzied days since the last report in this series has yielded a hinged mezzanine in my RUMP, new wiring harness headers, a nifty mounting tower for the RUMP control processor, progress on the new seat/steering system, and countless little nudges of recalcitrant hardware toward the Road. The ROAD. It’s out…

This is an intense time. Overload is a common theme: the bike, that perennial focus of attention supported by sponsorship and publicity, sits mostly idle while I work full time on sponsorship and publicity. It is a terrible thing to be finite. Progress is occurring on many fronts, but only a few of them result…

This posting in the Bikelab series featured a speculative tale of technomadic adventure that helped crystallize the vision of the bike systems. Even with specific references to long-obsolete products, it holds up decades later as a compelling geek fantasy. (The original post also announced my weekly open-house for Sun engineers, as well as the urgent…

The cardboard-core fiberglass packaging technique discussed here, originally suggested by David Berkstresser, has been such a popular subject that it long ago landed on its own page… even though it was originally part of this Bikelab Report. I’ll leave it over there for now and devote this post to the actual implementation of that space,…

The bikelab series was starting to hit its stride, and this issue focuses on the BEHEMOTH power system… a huge and central part of the project. As with the others, this text languished for decades in a dark corner of my site, with no images to shed any light on what I was talking about.…

This second issue of the Bikelab Notes, published during my time building BEHEMOTH at Sun Microsystems, focuses on the high-brightness LED taillight assemblies. These were not commercially available at the time, so this was a hack. I also commented on the wonderful facilities that Sun provided and answered a few reader questions. This was an…

While I was living at Sun Microsystems during the home stretch of the 3-year BEHEMOTH project, I started a publication series called the Bikelab Notes. Seventeen of these were published, and they carry some of the best technical details about the machine (since later media coverage was typically in the form of overviews slanted to…

Above: this selfie while grinding the hull of Nomadness in 2010 seems apropos during the plague of 2020. Tidal Passionby Steven K. Roberts May 1, 1990 I talk often of passion. It’s a driving theme of nomadness, of learning, of life in general — it’s the crystallization of dreams, the lust for evolution, the very antithesis…

This relic from 1989, early in the BEHEMOTH project (before it was called that), came to my attention exactly 30 years later thanks to Paul Schleck who alerted me to the website that is replaying usenet. At this moment in my life, I was fully immersed in the third bike version, at once thrilled and…

Bikelab Notes

Bikelab Report #7 – BEHEMOTH Network Architecture

Bikelab Report #6 – Various BEHEMOTH Tech Details

Bikelab Report #5 – On-the-road Scenario

Bikelab Report #4 – RUMP Packaging & Cardboard Core Composites

Bikelab Report #3 – Solar Power and Battery Babysitting

Bikelab Report #2 – the Sun Lab and LED Taillights

Bikelab Report #1 – BEHEMOTH Intro, HF Dipole, and Microwave Motion Sensor

Passion

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