Recently a few of my friends have asked me what could help encourage more people in my neighborhood to ride bicycles. For all the time I’ve been a bicycle commuter and advocate for cyclists in Detroit, I’ve never really considered what a specific neighborhood could do to encourage bicycle use. My work at Back Alley Bikes / The Hub of Detroit is rooted in a neighborhood that I moved out of, and after the Jeffries projects closed down it turned into less of a neighborhood resource and more of a city-wide resource (more on that in a minute). Whenever I’ve seen bicycle advocacy come up in the public discourse, it’s been about city-wide or state-wide issues (bicycle licensing, safe streets funding, etc). It’s not often that I see local/block-level efforts to promote green transportation… but isn’t that the right place to start?
Blair rides her bike when it's cold
It’s easy for me to not think about it on the day-to-day: I’m more than happy to jump on my bike and ride to work 5 miles away in the middle of winter… mostly because I’ve spent my whole life growing fond of cold-weather discomfort and learning how to fix a flat with frozen fingers. What would it take to convince someone with less pain tolerance and more concern for their finger’s nerve endings? If you look at North Corktown from a mainstream bicycle-aware urban planning standpoint, the situation might seem bleak. There isn’t much in place that would encourage non-automotive transportation: bus stops are mysterious, sidewalks come and go, and the nearest bike shop and grocery store are a half-hour walk away, in opposite directions; in other words, you’d better pray that you don’t end up with a broken chain and an empty pantry.
The mainstream urban planning fancy-pants plan for a neighborhood like North Corktown might include accoutrement like bicycle lanes, a marketing campaign to encourage alternative transporatation, and maybe a spokesthing for good measure. I think that a lot of these ideas may not be especially relevant to many of Detroit’s neighborhoods.
A pile of cycle in my neighborhood
Rather than paying tens of thousands of dollars per mile for silly things like these, I’d prefer to see that money go into Detroit’s growing bicycle service economy. Detroit has a history of creative entrepreneurship, and the last few years have seen a plethora of bicycle-related businesses start up: The Hub’s in-school youth education services and repair shop, Wheelhouse Detroit’s bicycle tours, Detroit Greencycle curbside recycling pickup, Cass Cafe’s food delivery service.
A bicycle-related business grows the local economy and promotes bicycling at the same time. These groups are putting down fertile soil to grow bigger and better things on in the future. Those bike lanes take a lot of nutrients to get going, don’t they? Shouldn’t we start with the basics?
I live across the street from an apartment complex that was recently bought by a neighborhood nonprofit. Many residents look forward to using some of the units for community institutions, and I think that it’d be a perfect site for regular bike education workshops. An organization like Fender Bender or Mt Elliott Makerspace could provide a mobile toolkit and some educators, and my neighbors could try wrenching a bit or maybe learn some winter bike riding skills.
Let's jam econo with small-fry bike education on a massive scale
Running a program like this can be done on a shoestring budget (c.f. Back Alley Bike’s budget of 4000/year a few years ago), and can have lasting impact as well as serve as a statistical/research base for expanding into new ideas and ventures. A few other projects (Earthworks on the east side and All Saints Church in SW) are running their own small-scale bike education programs, and I’d love to see more neighborhoods join in. In Earthworks’ case, The Hub sponsored the formation of a shop at the soup kitchen/community farm and it turned into a program on its own over the course of a year. And I heard that the youth at All Saints want to open up a retail shop…
It’s up to us to make these ideas and plans available to any and all neighborhoods in our city. As the above projects show, we have what it takes to make amazing things happen, without having to wait on municipal decisions or state mandates.
So in the end, I re-programed the Arduino with a 
Loving, Graceful Machines to Watch Your Chickens With
It’s gotten cold in Detroit again, and the chickens need the usual TLC: more food, more straw, heated water dispensers, and active heating inside the coop. In previous years we’ve used a single incandescent lightbulb to keep the coop at a hospitable temperature, but this year, we’re trying something different: we’ll use an infrared heat lamp along with a daylight-simulating incandescent lamp. The heat lamp can stay on all night and not bother the birds — inconsistent lighting might have a bad impact on the birds’ health. The incandescent lamp should turn on at the pre- and post-crepuscular hours at dusk and dawn to add a bit of daylight and keep egg production up.
You may remember last year when I posted about the chicken sensor, an arduino with a temperature sensor and an ethernet shield that attached to a wireless mesh node. After the weather got warm enough, I decommissioned the chicken sensor and haven’t touched the arduino platform since. Now it is time for me to jump back into the open source embedded systems fray: either I hack together a system to toggle these lamps and monitor temperature, or my neighbors and I are going to have to run out to the coop during those crepuscular hours and fumble around with electrical switches while getting our hands pecked off by feisty young hens.
So, in the interest of avoiding bloody pecked-up hands, I’ve planned out an upgraded chicken sensor: one could call it v0.2.0 or one could call it by the codename “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.” I chose this codename because it describes how the chickens will feel.
Remote Control
I’m glad that I have taken my time with the JeeNode: while searcing through the wiki I came across a few shiny gems of projects. The shiniest by far is JeeMon. I was initially planning on writing a little node.js server to listen for temperature packets and post them somewhere on the internet, but JeeMon is a much more full and exciting solution… and an excuse to improve my tcl skills (I’ve done some quick expect scripts before but that’s it). This blog post at jeelabs has a good introduction and quickstart.
So far, JeeMon seems like a winner of a platform for DIY network physical computing projects. It’s backed by a great programmer who develops great hardware. Tcl has some nice text processing features — so much of the work in this type of project is sucking information out of sometimes-garbled strings. Its event-driven-ness makes sense with random bursts of radio-transmitted information. Finally, although it has a lot of examples dealing with the jeenode world of things, it is not at all tied to a specific platform or network technology.
Toolchains
The Arduino IDE is very, very integrated: all of the required libraries for compiling are included within the distribution. This makes it nice and easy for people to get started with Arduino, and it also makes it easier to run multiple virtual environments of different versions of the IDE. It has some built-in features to let you use your own text editor, but it’s still pretty clumsy. For past projects I’ve had to run avrdude with non-standard options to flash a device; I ended up finding where the IDE would put the compiled .hex file during the build and upload it manually. This was a pain.
I started looking around the internet for alternative build methods for arduino programs and didn’t really come up with much; there are a lot of one-off projects (see links below) but all of them rely on a forked version of the Arudino libraries, or even a partial set of those libraries. This makes development really tricky, especially if you’re including non-standard libraries.
I’d love to see the Arduino IDE expose some of the development processes via the commandline. Another option might be to do an scons setup that uses the arduino IDE’s hardware/arduino/boards.txt as a reference.
What’s next
I’m going to continue tinkering with this stuff. Expect more posts as I learn.
One experiment I’m anxious to try out is to hook a JeeLink to an OpenWRT router and run jeemon right from the router. This might make a good addition to the community wireless toolkit we’re building at The Work Department.
Notes
When using the arduino sdk to push code to a jeenode, you generally need to set serial.debug_rate to 57600 in your ~/.arduino/preferences.txt
Check your soldering on the jeenode using the voltages listed in the link below. I messed up the RST -> capacitor connection which caused unreliable uploads but didn’t interfere with anything else… kinda hard to track that one down
Links
Toolchain (your mileage may vary)
“create your own arduino ide!”: http://pragprog.com/magazines/2011-04/create-your-own-arduino-ide
forum topic about makefiles: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284144128
arduino-makefile fork on github: https://github.com/pix/arduino-makefile
fix math.h compile error: http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?146,107925,107925,quote=1 (in short, add an #undef round before round is defined in avr’s math.h)
oh, this is nice: http://www.tmpsantos.com.br/en/2010/12/arduino-uno-ubuntu-cmake/
JeeNode
check board voltages against these values: http://forum.jeelabs.net/comment/3728#comment-3728
random weird project: http://engin1000.pbworks.com/w/page/37615506/RF%20Locator
Thermometers
library to read DS1820 sensors: http://milesburton.com/Dallas_Temperature_Control_Library#Example
a nice DS18B20 setup that I’m using: http://www.makershed.com/Waterproof_DS18B20_Digital_Temperature_Sensor_Ex_p/mkad37.htm
JeeMon
home: http://jeelabs.net/projects/cafe/wiki/jeemon
intro: http://jeelabs.org/2011/11/25/jeemon-for-early-birds/