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.
I think I should do something like that for my downhill bike! :)
Ride!
do you call that webdesign? to me webdesign is about good looks and maybe more importantly usability. that flash thing isn’t usable at all!
/rant
it looks like a fun project which has a good purpose, thumbs up on that!
based on the novel push by sapphire.
I agree with isama; i hope you were kidding about the web design.
wow, now that’s a way to get people interested in your “good purpose”. I mean seriously, the site attracts people, and although you can’t do much on it, it involves people on a cool way. They may sit behind a desk at work but can still feel themselves connected with the whole project.
Really nice project even without the good cause. But I think that for us people (and I think that’s isama’s problem) we would like to see the data and graphs, n stuff.. but most of the people out there don’t look at data as “cool”.. But why don’t they have a “making of”?
Warning! Obligatory LOTR reference:
“My preciousssss!!!”
Whenever I’m on a ride I think of all the things that I wish my bike computer did. Even just from the cadence and speed inputs, it could do a lot more interesting things with the data like a speed & cadence vs. distance plot, or telling me what gear I should be in to hit my target cadence.
My fantasy is to start an open hardware bike computer project. The bill of materials for a computer with cadence & speed would be pretty short: micro controller, lcd, buttons, hall effect sensors, wire… It would probably cost less than an equivalent commercial model, but could do so much more…
The feature I especially want is for it to show me the info about the track currently playing on my iPod/iPhone, via a wireless link.
this is stupid. i’d like to see how much extra money the added gimmic of sensor bike will make. enough to cover the expense of the build? i doubt it. also no way the bike said that on its own, it was written by a human, either when it was posted or preprogrammed. hardly a brain in the sense they make it out to be. also, “17 chased by dog” reads pretty crappy compared to the other numbers. where can i get a chased by dog-o-mometer anyway?
“Precious’s brain is an on-board device that captures all of his experiences” what a stupid name for a bike, least of all a male bike.
Atleast they put it on a proper pcb, and its not just clumsily wired up to an arduino dev board like every other project on here.
Awesome webdesign. Better than anything the turds that post here can do.
I think overall this is a awesome project,the real time feed back is cool although more in depth statistics would be nice. There needs to be more bike hacks like this Im not as technically savvy as most on this site, but I use a Mio gps that was flashed with a alternate firmware.It allows a me to run nice track plotter with all types of info about my ride.
Wow! Would not refuse such a bike, but the cost probably is not cheap.