Many exercise machines generate electricity as you pedal or climb in order to run the on-board electronics. Unfortunately if you stop or even slow down too much the juice will die and your exercise program will reset. Wanting to improve on this gotcha, [Mike] cracked open his exercise bike and added some super capacitors.

On the circuit board he found an ATmega128 was in charge of the user interface. He probed the board a little bit and couldn’t find how it was connected to the power regulators. After some additional snooping he found it has its own SOIC regulator separate from the ones that run the display and peripherals. He takes us through the calculations he made before choosing his parts. What he ended up with is a set of three supercaps in series that add about two minutes of juice before the levels drop and the chip resets. The design of the board helped a lot as the high-load electronics (like the LCD screen) are on a separate power bus than the processor.

[Tom Wilson] has finished his latest human powered quadcycle. The BigDog, as its called, seats 4 persons in lawn chairs who pedal to their destination. We say latest, for [Tom] also made a slightly smaller version called The DogSled. Some improvements include being taller (8 feet total), larger (11 feet by 6 feet), and surprisingly lighter (over half the weight, bringing it in to 450 pounds). The build process is just as impressive as the bike itself; using pneumatic disk brakes to golf cart axles to even drainage pipe, its a perfect fit for burning man. Catch a video after the divide.

[Thanks Mowcius]

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This is Precious. Precious is a bike that the folks over at BreakfastNY have anthropomorphised for a good cause. By adding sensors for a variety of data sources to the bike, and transmitting them back to a server via a cellular module, Precious can spit out cheeky comments about the ride on its Twitter feed. Right now Precious is on his way across the country powered by his rider, Janeen, to raise money and awareness for cancer research. You can track the progress, enjoying some attractive web design and reading the oft-beligerant comments from the bike, at yesiamprecious.com.

Although there’s no specifics about the hardware, we saw the typical project box during the teaser video. Inside you’re sure to find the usual suspects. Considering that speed, cadence, grade, temperature, humidity, and GPS data are all available on high-end bike computers we hope they found a way to just read in that data. But your guess is as good as ours; start speculating in the comments.

This long bike is built for haulin’. After needing to find a truck to transport his welding equipment (ironically in order to build another bike) [Nick Johnson] decided it was time to make a two-wheeled cargo transport. He extended the frame in order to add a cradle in the front. Eventually there will be sides on that box but for now it works like a charm for transporting his groceries. With the long wheel-base this should be pretty stable as long as you balance your cargo. We’d certainly be more apt to try a ride on this rather than the double-decker death-trap from a few weeks ago.

We normally advocate wearing a helmet when biking in case you get hit by a car. In this case the guy on the bottom of this double-decker bicycle should wear a helmet to avoid a boot to the head. When we started watching the video after the break we thought that [James] had just built a really really high bike. Not the case, he built an over-under tandem bicycle. What’s more outrageous? Check out that killer kick-stand twenty seconds into the clip.

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We’ve always put stock in ‘the quieter the better’ when it comes to road bikes. You’ll find this truth if you spend 100k on the back wheel of someone with a sqeaky rear derailleur. But apparently the folks at Effalo never learned this lesson as they’ve produced a bike computer that generates noise as you ride.

Perhaps it just takes some ingenuity to turn this into a beautiful music maker along the lines of the Force Trainer hack. No problem because the velosynth is a hackable design. The case was made with a vacuum form and inside you’ll find a bunch of small breadboards. The JeeNode, which is an Arduino/Xbee combination, serves as the heart of the device by taking speed and acceleration data from the bicycle wheel. From there it is passed on to various modules, Bob’s your uncle, and sound comes out. Check out their sales pitch after the break and if you’re starting to get some ideas about using this check out the open source info they’ve provided.

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[Garrett Birkel's] weekly ride usually features some pretty wild costumes. He wanted something to step up his own look so he make this LED mohawk bike helmet. He had an LED strip to start with and found a way to use acrylic and clear plastic tubing to fold the lights into the appropriate shape. From there he designed a PCB for some DC-DC converters to provide regulated power. The juice comes from Lithium Iron-Phosphate cells, the same kind we saw in the electric bike assist battery a few days ago. We find it a bit wild that you can pick out the PWM of the LEDs in the lens effect of that photograph.

[Tom] wanted to take the show on the road so he added lights to his bike using theater grade control hardware. The picture above shows three tail lights comprised of 195 LEDs. Built on perf-board, a DMX512 controller can display several patterns on each module. The lighting technician (bike pilot) controls the patterns through a series of switches on the handlebars. There’s several pages of details posted including schematics and firmware. This would bring a little extra fun the next time you ride in a Critical Mass event.