bicycle

237 Articles

Tricking A Bike Counter

June 20, 2026 by 84 Comments

Some municipalities implement bike counters on cycling routes in order to monitor traffic. [nullpxl] recently investigated how these counters work, and explored methods that can be used to trick the counter into thinking a bike passed over it.

A great many of these devices are built using inductive loop sensors. This involves passing a current through a loop of wire embedded in the ground. When a conductive item such as the metal wheel of a bike passes through the electric field, eddy currents are generated in the item, creating their own magnetic field which reacts with the loop’s field itself. This creates a change in inductance which can be measured, and thus used to log the number of times a conductive item has passed over the sensor. By looking at the signature of the inductance change, a system can be tuned to detect specific objects—for example, two bicycle wheels passing over a sensor will create a signal that varies over time in a characteristic way.

[nullpxl] first tried to recreate a “bike” signal for the inductive loop by running over the area holding two metal pans. This wasn’t close enough, so a new idea was needed. Experiments with a scrap bike then indicated that there was a speed gate involved, and that wheeling one wheel over the sensor and back again could trick the sensor into thinking a bike had passed by. Eventually, [nullpxl] distilled all this learning down to create “the BIKE BASKET.” It’s simply a bag with a bike wheel in it, and swinging it over the sensor twice makes the counter tick up.

Is there any money in tricking the average municipal bike counter in your local city? We doubt it, unless Big Bike is getting increasingly filthy in its lobbying efforts. In any case, we love to see weird sensor hacks around these parts. Continue reading “Tricking A Bike Counter” →

A Bicycle Built On An Italian Renaissance Tech Base

May 26, 2026 by 30 Comments

There is a drawing of a bicycle in one of Leonarda DaVinci‘s sketchbooks– except it wasn’t drawn by DaVinci, and dates long after his death, so we can’t say the old master invented the bicycle. We can, however, wonder what it would have looked like if he did– and so did the [How To Make Everything] YouTube channel. As you might expect, they investigated the question of a Renaissance Bicycle in the best possible way: they built one.

In some ways the device looks like the first, primitive hobby-horse proto-bicycle of the early 19th century, which is not without reason. From the renaissance to the dawn of the industrial era, there wasn’t a huge change in how europeans worked with wood, and in both eras wood is the obvious choice. Where this bike differs from [Karl Drais]’s invention is that it has both pedals and brakes– both of them using drawings from DaVinci’s sketchbook.

You might be surprised to learn that ball-bearings are period-appropriate, and weren’t even invented by DaVinci. The drum brake, on the other hand, is right out of the Old Master’s notes: a steel band wraps around a drum on the rear break, and is tighened by a lever. With iron rims, no brake would stop on a dime, and this probably works as well as anything while being quite simple to make.

The chain is also based on one in DaVinci’s notes, and honesty it’s a weak point of the design; they’d likely have been better off with a leather belt, or perhaps a stack of gears as we’ve seen before. The hand-made chain just isn’t able to get the bike up to riding speed. Still, this is recognizably a bicycle and entertaining content for anyone who plans on violating the temporal prime directive or wants to get around after the apocalypse.

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Challenging The Way We Pedal

May 9, 2026 by 59 Comments

The bicycle is an invention that has not changed in its fundamentals since the first recognisably modern machines appeared in the closing years of the 19th century. Its frame uses a structure of two triangles, its wheels are equal in size, and it’s propelled by a pedal crank and (in most cases) a chain. Bicycles have improved vastly in materials and performance, but if you were to wheel a 2026 tourer into an 1886 bike shop, the Victorian proprietor would recognise it. Only a very brave engineer would try to fundamentally change such a formula, but here’s [Not programming] with a crankless bicycle.

The idea is to replace the crank’s circular motion with a linear one, thus providing a more constant propulsion. The build was inspired by another that used a sinusoidal track in a rotating cylinder to achieve the necessary conversion. This design takes a different tack, using an arrangement of gears and freewheels he describes as a mechanical rectifier to convert the back-and-forth motion of pedaling into rotation. The pedals themselves are stirrups mounted at each end of a V-belt.

This build is an exercise in pushing the limits of 3D print strength, as prototype after prototype shears under load. He does finally get the thing to work, though, and we admire his persistence. Oddly, this isn’t the first 3D-printed bicycle geartrain we’ve seen.

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Bicycle Tubes Aren’t Just Made Of Rubber Anymore

April 29, 2026 by 47 Comments

For the average rider, inner tubes have been one of the most enduring and unchanging parts of bicycle design over the decades. They’re made of rubber, they have a Schrader or Presta valve, and they generally do an okay job at cushioning the ride.

However, if you’re an above-average rider, or just obsessive about your gear, you might consider butyl rubber tubes rather old hat. Today, there are far fancier—and more expensive—options on the market if you’re looking to squeeze every drip of performance out of your bike.

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Looking At A Bike Built For The Apocalypse

March 26, 2026 by 17 Comments

So-called bug out cars are a rather silly venture that serve little purpose more than snagging your jumper. The odds of a car working well through a nuclear winter are rather minimal. But what about a bicycle? On paper it’s a better choice, with extreme efficiency, reliability, and runs off whatever sustenance you can find in the barren landscape of a collapsed society. But [Seth] over at Berm Peak proved an apocalypse bike is at least as silly as a bug out car.

While a utilitarian bike fit for a cross-country trek across a nuclear wasteland can certainly be a reasonable venture, this particular bicycle is not that. This three wheeled monstrosity of a bicycle (is it still a bicycle if it has three wheels?) was built by [TOMO] for the Bespoked bike show’s apocalypse buildoff. It placed second among a number of strange bikes with features ranging from pedal driven circular saws to beer keg grills. But this particular example of apocalypse bike is easily the strangest example of the lot.

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Ebike Charges At Car Charging Stations

March 5, 2026 by 18 Comments

Electric vehicles are everywhere these days, and with them comes along a whole slew of charging infrastructure. The fastest of these are high-power machines that can deliver enough energy to charge a car in well under an hour, but there are plenty of slower chargers available that take much longer. These don’t tend to require any specialized equipment which makes them easier to install in homes and other places where there isn’t as much power available. In fact, these chargers generally amount to fancy extension cords, and [Matt Gray] realized he could use these to do other things like charge his electric bicycle.

To begin the build, [Matt] started with an electric car charging socket and designed a housing for it with CAD software. The housing also holds the actual battery charger for his VanMoof bicycle, connected internally directly to the car charging socket. These lower powered chargers don’t require any communication from the vehicle either, which simplifies the process considerably. They do still need to be turned on via a smartphone app so the energy can be metered and billed, but with all that out of the way [Matt] was able to take his test rig out to a lamppost charger and boil a kettle of water.

After the kettle experiment, he worked on miniaturizing his project so it fits more conveniently inside the 3D-printed enclosure on the rear rack of his bicycle. The only real inconvenience of this project, though, is that since these chargers are meant for passenger vehicles they’re a bit bulky for smaller vehicles like e-bikes. But this will greatly expand [Matt]’s ability to use his ebike for longer trips, and car charging infrastructure like this has started being used in all kinds of other novel ways as well.

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Bicycle Tows 15,000 Pounds

January 4, 2026 by 13 Comments

An old joke in physics is that of the “spherical cow”, poking fun at some of the assumptions physicists make when tackling a new problem. Making the problem simple like this can help make its fundamentals easier to understand, but when applying these assumptions to real-world problems these assumptions are quickly challenged. Which is what happened when [Seth] from Berm Peak attempted to tow a huge trailer with a bicycle — while in theory the bike just needs a big enough gear ratio he quickly found other problems with this setup that had to be solved.

[Seth] decided on a tandem bike for this build. Not only does the second rider add power, but the longer wheelbase makes it less likely that the tongue weight of the trailer will lift the front wheel off the ground. It was modified with a Class 3 trailer hitch, as well as a battery to activate the electric trailer brakes in case of an emergency. But after hooking the trailer up the first time the problems started cropping up. At such a high gear ratio the bike is very slow and hard to keep on a straight line. Some large, custom training wheels were added between the riders to keep it stable, but even then the huge weight still caused problems with the chain and even damaged the bike’s freehub at one point.

Eventually, though, [Berm Peak] was able to flat tow a Ford F-150 Lightning pulling a trailer a few yards up a hill, at least demonstrating this proof of concept. It might be the absolute most a bicycle can tow without help from an electric motor, although real-world applications for something like this are likely a bit limited. He’s been doing some other bicycle-based projects with more utility lately, including a few where he brings abandoned rental e-bikes back to life by removing proprietary components.

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