Quickie Hack: Turn Your Bicycle Into A Party Machine

I was looking for a way to play tunes while biking the other day, and was too lazy to get out the CAD program and design something to print on my RepRap. Here’s a dirt cheap & quick hack to get some decent quality sound while riding your bike. All you need is 4 zip ties:

party1

party2

party3

party4

 

The only tricky part is that I criss-crossed the ties that attach it to the bike.. that is, I took the end of one tie and inserted it into the other tie, instead of its own end. This added some stability, and prevents the speaker from getting damaged due to rubbing against the handlebars. Be sure to rotate the speaker to the proper orientation for you to access its controls before tightening it up.

The speaker I used is a cheap Chinese fake Beats by Dr Dre speaker. I bought it on AliExpres for $13.88 including shipping from China. It’s also known as the “S11 bluetooth speaker,” and is available on eBay, as well. It has a built-in lithium-ion battery, Bluetooth connectivity, including speakerphone (the microphone is crap, though), and even has pause and track skipping buttons. It also has a cable for connecting it via a headphone jack, and even sports a microSD slot, so you can use it completely standalone. Not only is it loud, but the sound is actually better than lots of speakers I’ve tried that cost a lot more. The black model has a rubberized casing, which helps avoid damage from rough handling. It also comes in a rainbow of colors, some with metal casing, instead.

Now, I just keep my iPhone in my pocket, and pause/skip tracks using the buttons on the speaker. The speaker doesn’t have a volume control, but I can easily reach in my pocket and hit the volume buttons w/o looking at it. I took it on a 50 mile bike ride the other day, and the speaker didn’t vibrate off.

 

Arduino IDE suddenly freezing up? Here’s how to fix it.

Every once in a while, my Arduino IDE suddenly takes forever to launch, sticking at the splash screen for a long time. Even after it launches, it’s still basically unusable, because the pull-down menus also freeze up, and take an eternity to respond. It happens to me every time I download a new Arduino IDE, which is so infrequent that repeatedly forget why it happens, and how to fix it. After ripping my hair out for a while, I start googling until I find the fix.

If you’re experiencing this problem running Arduino on Microsoft Windows, chances are, you have a virtual serial port from a Bluetooth SPP device installed in your system. The problem is that the Arduino IDE is trying to enumerate your system’s serial ports in order to locate the attached Arduino devices, and the code takes a long time to timeout. Luckily, user eried in the Arduino forums figured out what was happening, and posted a fix in the thread: Road to solve the delay in Arduino IDE. He has graciously come up with a workaround, and shared it with us.

The fix is easy. Simply download his rar file, extract his new rxtxSerial.dll, and replace the version that’s currently in the same directory where your arduino.exe resides. I’ve also attached a zip archive of the file below, for those people who don’t want to install WinRAR in order to get the new rxtxSerial.dll. Thanks, eried!

Downloads: rxtxSerial-2.2_fixed_2009-03-17.zip