nicholasdejong.com

Part of the fun of the ride is the preparation of the ride. I briefly mentioned in my ride announcement post that I had ambitions to take a certain amount of technology/digital stuff with me to record photos and transmit live GPS position updates to enable friends to track my progress online (probably with the help of Google Maps). To add such complexity to the already involved task of riding a moto across the US might sound mad but I need a project to keep me busy until the ride.

For now I will persist ! What breakable, non-weather proof, power hungry digital bits am I talking about?

• Helmet with integrated Bluetooth. (as yet undecided manufacturer)
• Garmin Zumo 550 Motorcycle Navigator.
• Blackberry Curve.
• Tiny form factor PC - FitPC.
• 2 mega pixel USB style camera.

OK, the FitPC sounds crazy until you understand what it is to be used for and how compact and power light it is, so lets go through how all these pieces connect:-

• The helmet is to be paired via Bluetooth with the GPS in order to listen to music/radio and to provide annoying direction "suggestions".
• The GPS is to be connected via serial cable to the FitPC to provide latitude/longitude position data to be logged on the FitPC.
• The USB camera is to be mounted in a suitable weather proof enclosure and the FitPC will log snapshot images once every X minutes.
• The Blackberry is to be connected to the FitPC as a tethered modem to enable data transmission (when in service areas) of position data and photo some limited photo snapshots when bandwidth over the Blackberry tethered modem permits.
• The built-in WLAN will be configured to automatically join any available network (not that I expect to see many) and "burst" as much data from the FitPC as possible. I expect the tethered modem bandwidth to range from zero to limited in many of the areas I'll travel so any opportunity to burst out a large chuck of data must be taken advantage of if at all possible.

And then back here on nicholasdejong.com I simply create a simple bit of PHP that loads Google Maps along with my logged GPS data together with links to some snapshot images from the USB camera mounted out the front of the bike. I'll add some capability for people to comment on the images and it should all be quite entertaining at your end.

I'm not worried (yet) about the power requirements since the later model KLR650's have larger alternators than they need and FitPC stock draws just 6W and can be configured to consume even less (see comments from the actual supplier below, thanks Irad!) when fitted with a solid state hard disk drive and video controller turned off - wow!

My real concern is that of vibration. I'm surely going to observe Irad's comments (below) to really make sure my HDD is secure inside the FitPC to prevent it shaking around, my thought had been to place the FitPC into a purpose built shock absorbing little shelf/mount inside one of the sealed hard case side panniers - I'll find a way to make it work.

On the matter of vibration I purposely ordered my FitPC without a HDD so I could install a solid-state hdd that at least has a fighting chance of dealing with the constant vibration of a bike. I purchased my SSD at the same time as the FitPC and was lucky to notice that within moments of pressing the online order button I'd purchased the wrong type of SSD (I'd purchased a SATA drive not an ATA). Fortunately I was able to call and cancel the order right away before it entered their dispatch system. Since then I've purchased a 32GB Transcend 2.5" Solid State IDE/ATA Disk which should be ample storage for my use.

In terms of sizing the SSD I've taken the following basic calculation -- a 28 day ride, probably 20 days total on the bike as I plan to stop here and there, 5 to 6 hours a day riding, 4500 miles from NYC to SF on my planned route means an average speed of 41 miles/hour. I don't have a good sense of weather this is too fast or slow at this stage since my planned route avoids highways and the like, either way if it is too slow I can always join the highway for a few days to pick up the pace. Why is all this important? Well as you may have noticed I intend to take snapshot images from a camera on the front of the bike and so if the above numbers make sense I'll be on the bike for ~110 hours total which means if each image is 512Kb at I take an image every 10 seconds we are looking at ~20GB of images all up.

The resulting video should be pretty interesting!

N