Heel Treads Make Shoes Go

Motorized treads as a replacement for the heel of your shoe? Okay, remember how The Jetsons had moving sidewalks everywhere so you wouldn’t have to walk at all? Well, there’s a much more efficient way to do it and Treadway Mobility seems to have figured it out. In the video after the break you can see several of their prototype units zipping the wearer around quite happily. We think the best part is that with the tread locked in place you can stand and walk like normal, assuming you don’t feel like you have a block of concrete attached to each foot. Maybe the real question is which is more geeky, this or the power lace shoes?

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30 Mph Electric Mountain Bike

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBn-VIzJsSk]

A 48 volt power house pushes this mountain bike at speeds up to 30Mph.  That’s a bit of a boost from many off the shelf E-bikes. [Jennifer Holt] wanted speed, and to retain the off road capabilities of her bike, so she made a custom one. As you can see in the video, this thing gets going fast and hills are no problem. She says that it will toss you off if you slam the throttle, and we believe her. We know some of you will insist on chiding her because she’s not wearing a helmet in those videos. She did manage to break her elbow offroading in the video after the break. That part is edited out though.

[via Makezine]

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Sidecar Reminiscent Of Conjoined Twins

Finally, an answer to the problem of sidecar dorkiness. [François Knorreck] spent ten years hand crafting a sidecar with a beautiful design and a luxurious interior for two. The frame is aluminum, the body is mostly carbon fiber, and there are countless details such as automatic chain tension control and steering for the sidecar wheel that make this more than just a pretty paint job.

[Thanks Geekabit]

Touchscreen Scooter Computer

[Kurt’s] scooter computer started off as a way to use a couple of LEDs to show the battery charge on his hog. It was based on a Arduino and used a voltage divider to judge how much juice was left. But then he ran across a touch-screen OLED shield for the Arduino and the project started to take off. Now he’s got battery, temperature, real-time clock, and GPS running through the slick-looking display. It may not be a full-blown motorcycle but it gives the computer interfaces we’ve seen for other bikes a run for their money.

[Thanks Mowcius]

Another Take On A Bicycle Built For Two

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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Velosynth Annoys Those Around You As You Ride

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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Replacement Speedometer

[Howard] built his own replacement speedometer for his truck after the original speedometer cable broke. He’s using surface mount components and produced a two-board design that is quite nice. When he tipped us off he mentioned that this is Arduino powered and uses a hall effect sensor. There’s not talk of this in his writeup but we gather that he’s just using the bootloader on an AVR chip and that he hall effect sensor measures the rotation of one of the wheels. When the vehicle isn’t moving the board alternates between max speed and trip distance. Once he’s on the roll it shows current speed.