Riding to work with the Rubbee

First i did a test run last Sunday to the office (approx 15 miles) and after a short break back again:

• to work 70 minutes
• back home 70 minutes
• only put the Rubbee on the wheel for the uphill sections, so had still a little bit spare when i got home
• very nice ride: cloudy with 2 minutes of drizzle when i started out, sunny by the time i got to the office. Could have done with more water. No backpack.
• on wet sections the noise the Rubbee made was quite bad ... slipping over the knobbly bits of the tire i guess.

Wednesday was the first for real:

• to work 66 minutes, ran out of power just before the office (200m)
• back home 64 minutes, ran out of power about a mile from home
• using the Rubbee almost 75% of the time, only taking it off the wheel for the downhill sections
• couldn't get my rhythm until i was almost at the office, just not used to exercise that early in the morning i guess...
• cooler than Sumday on the way back
• my front light warns that it's getting low on power after about 40 minutes by switching the indicator from green to orange, it is however still bright at the end of ride
• also changed from knobbly tires to road tires (for a second i was tempted to go for near slicks ... but the roads are pretty bad so i went for a bit more sensible ones.
• first time with a backpack, may also have contributed to the not so pleasant ride in, i haven't ridden with a backpack for ages.

Friday:

• to work 68 minutes
• back home 67 minutes
• much better rider in, despite the roads being wet and me getting rather muddy, 
• the way back was harder as it was hot! The backpack did not help...
• drawback in the wet was that the Rubbee started slipping when i put on more power (seemed ok to keep the same speed).
• forgot the recharge the front light, got home and it was still orange (and quite bright)

The Rubbee starts to run with much less resistance than when it was new, hope this continues to improve as it slows you down quite a bit. that's the reason for taking it off the wheel on the downhill sections, the cost is about two minutes each time and you have to slowback, wait for a gap between cars before you can accelerate.

Number of stops:

• five on the way to work (for Wednesday and Friday)
• four on the way back (again Wednesday and Friday only)

So there is the potential to shave off ten to twelve minutes on the way to work and eight to 10 on the way back, but only if the Rubbee runs near-frictionless (assumption is that there is a 30 second loss on slowing down and accelerating).
55 minutes each way sounds tempting... can the Rubbee do it or do i need a real electric mountain bike. I'd need to leave the car and the the ebike a thousand times to break even ... need to find a better reason than just financial i guess.

Never lose the locking pin on my Rubbee again!

On a long down hill section (public road in Surrey, rather bumpy due to the potholes) i had my Rubbee off the back wheel. And at the bottom it was on my wheel ... somewhere along the way i'd lost the locking pin (and i wasn't in the mood to cycle back up).

Never again! Here is my solution (ignore the yellow bits, that clip is just temporary until i find the one i want to use again... same for the temporary 'locking pin', i'm not going to ride with that!):

Clip it through the ring of the locking pin, so that if it falls out again i can just pop it back in.

Accessing IR-Blue-DM from linux

Note: do the initial tests with the bluetooth dongle straight on the machine (Udoo in my case) instead of plugged in a hub. Scanning works on a hub but for some reason rfcomm doesn't connect very often if the dongle is on a hub.

Quick hack #1:

Check if we can see the device:
root@imx6-qsdl:/home/ubuntu# hcitool scanScanning ...
    EC:FE:xx:xx:xx:xx    IR-Blue-DM

Same using LE:
root@imx6-qsdl:/home/ubuntu# hcitool lescan
LE Scan ...
EC:FE:xx:xx:xx:xx





Check if we need a pin:
root@imx6-qsdl:/home/ubuntu# bluez-simple-agent hci0 EC:FE:xx:xx:xx:xx
Release
New device (/org/bluez/5683/hci0/dev_EC_FE_xx_xx_xx_xx)
Seems we don't need one, connect using rfcomm.
root@imx6-qsdl:/home/ubuntu# rfcomm connect hci0 EC:FE:xx:xx:xx:xx        
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to EC:FE:xx:xx:xx:xx on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup
^CDisconnected





See if there is any data:
root@imx6-qsdl:/home/ubuntu# cat /dev/rfcomm0

And after you do 'echo >/dev/rfcomm0 "R001\r\n"' in another terminal there is data!:
E211208208208215214212212218220218213222223221218223223221216224225223220227226225222226227225223228228227225229229228225229228229228229230230228230230229230230230231230230230229229227229227227188188188188205205196196205205205196205205205205213205205205205213205205213213213205213213213205213213222213222222222213222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222213222222222  0 17 17 10 41 62 62 52 79 86 96 90103121124107131152159138159162169148169183183155179186186162179193193159176190190165176186183148172172176131151158158120124138145 96103107110 65 69 75 68 23255255255255255255255255255255  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0216221205  0  0  0  8150 26 17 93105 36230 79 40 34  0128  0  0255 33  0188 26190 59 25245 27150 26255 30116 91166 32136 44 10 33  1 26EX

R144006836145-00045I   -54   -54   -52   -54   -53   -54   -51   -50   -52   -50   -52   -49   -50   -50   -49   -47   -51   -51   -51   -49   -52   -50   -50   -48   -48   -50   -45   -47   -45   -43   -42   -44   -41   -42   -43   -45   -27   -41   -43   -44   -40   -41   -41   -43   -42   -42   -42   -42   -44   -43   -43   -42   -42   -43   -42   -42   -42   -41   -42   -40   -42   -42   -42   -41X



Quick hack #2:

Use a small python routine to read data:
import serial
import time

ser=serial.Serial("/dev/rfcomm0", baudrate=57600,timeout=0.1)
ser.open()
ser.write("R001"+chr(13)+chr(10))

while (1==1):
 d=ser.readline()
 print len(d),d

Success! Now to write something that gets temperature values and shows the result graphically...

I found the R001 command in the android code on http://github.com/RHWorkshop , the H command can be used to increase the speed at which the data is sent.