The project is pretty reliable now. I regularly train against previous rides. Having beat a previous time, it's quite exciting and stimulating to try to retain the lead. I have been dropping seconds quite frequently. All I have to do is keep going at it, and I'll be in good condition for a springtime time trial I'm training for.

I also have added code to publish the times and distances to IRC. For example:

The format is:

• Time in milliseconds
• Distance in km

Eventually, the software will be able to pull in competitors times and display the differences, just as it does with prerecorded times.

Here's what I spent so far:

• $20 for used bike trainer.
• $3.50 for a female connector, used in the joystick.
• $1.50 or so for postage. The magnet and sensor was donated.

Pretty inexpensive. Hopefully some more people will join in and build similar projects.

Looks like the GUI I wrote in GTK seems to be stable, at least in the living room. I need to take it down to the bike. When I was running it yesterday, I got 3km into the ride when the program crashed. What a horrible feeling. I think I had some mutual-exclusion issues with how GTK handles threading. Seems to be stable now, so I'll give it a shot tomorrow.

The sensor is hooked up and I've done a few minor time trials. With the data collection feature, I'm able to automatically generate plots of various practice runs.

In the above graphic, I have two of my runs, plus one of my son's.

Total cost so far: $4.50 (I needed a socket for the connector, bought at Radio Shack). I had the rest of the parts at home, plus the reed sensor was sent by my dad ($1.50 or so, shipping).

Pepsi has chosen JDRF as one of three participants in the Pepsi Refresh Challenge, an online campaign to fund worthy non-profit projects that impact children nationally. Three charities are aligned with three National League Football League players. Until midnight tonight, people can vote on the NFL’s website (http://www.nfl.com/pepsirefresh) and via text message (text ‘MARK’ to PEPSI (73774) for one of those three players, with the player/charity receiving the most votes over the course of the week receiving a $100,000 grant.

For the internet bike racing project, I modified an old Gravis Gamepad Pro controller to have a stereo headphone jack connected to two of the buttons. The plan is to get a reed (magnetic) switch, connect it to the bicycle and have it tripped by a magnet on the rotating wheel. This then acts as if a button was pressed on the joystick, and signals the software to do some processing.