An ancient green binder has followed me around from lab to lab through the decades, and it contains all the hand-drawn schematics, software, design sketches, and operating procedures for the Winnebiko II system. This machine rolled out of the lab in 1986, and kept me amused until 1988 when rapidly advancing technology seduced me into the 3-year BEHEMOTH project. This version of the bike covered about 6,000 miles (of 17,000 total).
The scans below describe console operation in detail (photos reference named devices, and an overview of the whole bike is available). Scroll down to see schematics of the bicycle control processor (68HC11) interface with Model 100 and other devices, and there is also a chart for the handlebar chord keyboard that let me write while riding.
Winnebiko II Control System Console Operation
by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs April 10, 1987
Handlebar chord keyboard codes – this is how I typed on the Model 100 while riding, squeezing these binary combinations. The low five bits were mapped to my strongest fingers (4-2-1 on right and ZON-SET on left), with the others being SHF-CTR-NUM zone bits for less-commonly used characters. Alone, they were return, backspace, and space… and transition from any bits to no bits created a strobe to accept the OR of all that had been depressed. Easier than it sounds….
Winnebiko II console at the very end of its era, just before the beginning of the BEHEMOTH project.
Winnebiko II console in a corner of my lab 35 years later. The bike itself (BEHEMOTH version with later console) is now in the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
Unfolding the Winnebiko II console during a 1987 interview. Large board at the top is the Traveling Software Booster Pak, adding memory to the Model 100, and just below that is the 68HC11 Bicycle Control Processor along with the “kluge board” containing all the interface logic shown in the drawings below.
These schematics show some of the circuitry associated with the 68HC11 bicycle control processor, including the handlebar chord keyboard and interface with the Model 100. This is what allowed me to type while riding, and was built on a hinged insulation-displacement prototyping board in November, 1986:
This circuitry pretended to be the keyboard of the Radio Shack Model 100 built into the console, allowing characters typed on the handlebar chord keyboard to be entered into a text editor.This bike, as well as those that followed, depended on the flexibility of crosspoint switching and other “soft” configuration. Anything could talk to anything (serial or audio). In this machine, it was done with simple analog switches controlled by a decoder.
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