Well, another year of Iro Sprints at the Sadie Hawkins day race and style ride in Chicago is finished. The party crowd was slightly smaller this year but the sprint competition was quite fierce.
When all was said and done, only one technical restart occurred and the top male and female also happened to have the fastest times of the entire night. Congratulations to Hannah and Brandon for their impressive victories, and condolences to Hailey and Josh, who each narrowly lost a set of Milwaukee Bicycle hubs.
Check out Sam's Picasa for a few awesome photos. I'll post more links to photos of the event as people get around to uploading them.
As for upcoming Iro Sprints events, the December series is gonna be something else.
Post the fastest time, male and female, of the entire series and you will win the series. There will be nightly prizes and tournaments but you do not have to come to all three nights to win. Any profits will go to The BMEF.
Well, I've sent this out to everybody I can find. But if we have any lurker out there or someone I forgot: listen up! If you are reading thes message after 11/04, you are too late to order:
We've been making some changes to Opensprints lately:
1) We've designed Circuit Board which cuts down a LOT on soldering and uses plain old ethernet cable to connect the sensors to the interface board: 2) We've switched from the UBW to the Arduino which means that it is much simpler to extend the software and much easier to find Electrical Engineers who are familiar with the processor we use. 3) We've switched from Cairo to shoes which means opensprints is much easier to install and will mean that one day we can run on windows and intel OSX easily. 4) Four Bikes! (if you want it)
There will be a group buy going down within the next two weeks to get more PCBs, and I want to give you the chance to get in on it. The cost will be $30-$60 (depending on our total volume).
Portland recently had a very interesting event, organized by rapha: Rapha Cross Roller Race. Part roller racing, part pixie bikes, part obstacle course with a generous helping of beer. Here are some pictures of the fun:
The OpenSprints crew in New Orleans, LA, "NOLA Bike Race" is throwing a halloween zombiecat race! There will be goldsprints at the afterparty. Here are the details:
Tomorrow night opensprints are going down in Chicago, IL. The address is at a private residence so you have to RSVP to
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
to know where it is!
This is my first time using the newly designed and fabricated Printed Circuit Boards. I am pumped!
I just stumbled across some photos of the battery powered OpenSprints being used at the Bike Film Festival back in August. It was a great time, and it was great to be able to run a race outside in full daylight at a block party. Bike film festival 2008 was great, I can't wait for next year.
We got a 6 device test run of the Printed Circuit Boards. They are beautiful and work great. I'll post some pictures of them when I assemble my next setup. But here are pictures of the CADs that got sent off to be etched:
If you are in the new york area and want to see these brand new boards in action, go check out Squid, Carlos, marc and company at the I-Cycle Throwdown:
The NOLA Racing team has put together an Open Sprints rig! I am pretty happy for them. They have had one event already and they are doing another real soon:
If you are close to New Orleans, I suggest you check it out. Here are some pictures from their last event:
I stumbled across a guide to making a fork mount today. These are probably not as safe as the Kreitler variety, but they could be welded directly onto the rollers, eliminating the need for platforms to hold the formkounts down. Has anyone out there managed to build their own forkmounts?
I have been bitten by the Distributed Version Control bug, and am no longer happy with subversion. Git should make it much easier for each city's OpenSprints operators to maintain their own customized version of the source code. Browse the new repo: