mobile lab

2 Articles

Bionode Is Hand Truck Transformed Into Mobile Computing Lab

February 26, 2026 by 13 Comments

[Steven K. Roberts] is the original digital nomad, having designed and built mobile computing for his own use since the 80s. His latest project is Bionode, a portable computing lab built into a hand truck that can accommodate a wide spectrum of needs for a person on the go.

Far more than just a portable computer with wheels and a handle, Bionode is an integrated collection of systems with power management, a sensor suite, multiple computers, NAS for storage, networking, video production tools, and even the ability to be solar charged. [Steven] also uses a laptop, and Bionode complements it by being everything else.

If one truly wishes to be mobile and modular as well as effective, then size and weight begins to be just as important as usability. Everything in Bionode has a purpose, and it currently contains a PC with GPU for local AI and machine learning work, a NAS with 14 TB of storage, an Ubuntu machine, a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant, another Raspberry Pi 5 for development work, a Raspberry Pi 3 for running his 3D printer, and a Raspberry Pi 4 for SDR (software-defined radio) work. A smart KVM means a single keyboard, mouse, and display can be shared among machines as needed and additional hardware in a thoughtful layout makes audio and video projects workable. Everything is integrated with sensors and Home Assistant with local AI monitoring, which [Steven] likes to think of as the unit’s nervous system.

Bionode is therefore more than just a collection of computers crammed into a hand truck; it’s a carefully-selected array of hardware that provides whatever [Steven] needs.

Give it a look if you want to see what such a system looks like when it’s been designed and assembled by someone who’s “been there, done that” when it comes to mobile computing. Bionode would complement something like a mobile workshop quite nicely; something [Steven] has also done before.

Thanks [Paul] for the tip!

36C3: Phyphox – Using Smartphone Sensors For Physics Experiments

December 29, 2019 by 7 Comments

It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.

While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.

Aside from demonstrating the app itself, if you ever wondered how sensors like the accelerometer, magnetometer, or barometric pressure sensor inside your phone actually work, and which one of them you can use to detect toilet flushing on an airplane and measure elevator velocity, and how to verify your HDD spins correctly, you will enjoy the talk. If you just want a good base for playing around with sensor data yourself, it’s all open source and available on GitHub for both Android and iOS.

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