A little cool

Being the last weekend I'll be in CT for about a month, I was itching to hit the trails today.  I met up with Stitch from the Crankfire boards and headed out into the West Hartford Reservoir.  At 9am, it was 3°F.  We tentatively headed out for a ride 'round the outer loop; The cold was close to putting a kibosh on the ride at a few points.  Once we had reached the top of the main climb that starts out near the main parking lot that goes up onto the top of the ridge, we had finally warmed up along with the air enough to keep on going and commit to the full outer loop.

With very little melting having taken place, the trails were coated with about 2" of light fluffy powder.  The cold had convinced me to switch to platform pedals for the day along with regular winter boots.  This was a good opportunity to try out my Crank Bros 50/50 XX pedals that haven't seen much action yet.  A couple weeks ago, I added all of the extra traction pins they came with in addition to raising up all the pins that were already in place.  This made an amazing difference.  They moved over from being pretty parts to being functional pretty parts.  I still haven't gotten fully used to riding with free feet, I definitely like being clipped in for hoisting the rear end up and over logs, but these pedals are great.  They were extra convenient during an extremely quick endo... Other gear for the day confirmed for me that the combo of a Panaracer Rampage 2.3 out back and a WTB Stout 2.3 up front is the perfect combo for my riding style.  I'm glad I have an extra Stout in reserve since WTB isn't making them anymore.

It looked like there were at least a couple other fools out riding, we followed a pair of tracks most of the way around.  About a third of the way around I actually had to ditch my softshell jacket in favor of a fleece vest over my wool longsleeve jersey.  It never got close to being above freezing, but we were able to at least stop for a few chat breaks and remain comfortable.  Here's me, post ride with major beardcicles:

Next time I ride here, I suspect there may not be any snow left.  I'm headed to Maine, Texas, and maybe London for about a month (or more) where I'll be hopefully snowboarding and doing some riding too aside from work.  Some good shop time is coming my way though.  I'm taking the parts to build up my cruiser into an Xtracycle cargo bike.  Big time looking forward to the build, I picked up a FreeRadical kit after Xmas that's been patiently waiting for me.  Hopefully I'll be able to get in some time in road riding it and my fixed gears that still live up there too.  Sadly, I will be tearing my BB-1 down to the frame to steal it's components for the build, it won't be the first time I've done that though.  It's going to be a frankenbike like no other;  Curvy cruiser frame, cyclocross fork, Titec Jones H-bar, 700c tour bike front wheel w/32mm tire, 26" atb rear w/ 2.3" balloon tire, and 1x7 drivetrain.  She gonna be purty, oh baby.  Long term it'll get more normal as I pick up some new parts but till summer, it'll stay freaky.  If anyone is still following my progress on the BikeGen, progress has stalled but have been making 3.2 amps (38.4w) steadily while riding each night.

10 Things I've learned about weight management

I know a lot of people with the usual  "get in shape" New Year's resolution.  I've made the same resolution for the last few years of once again achieving my pre-college weight.  I've gotten close before but I always end up sliding back up in the fall and winter.  I work at a computer, sitting all day.  With cycling being my main activity, it really slows down in the winter, it can sometimes be hard to get that motivation to get on the trainer and go nowhere fast.  So here's a list of bits of knowledge I've learned over the years that actually do help me (disclaimer:  I'm not a doctor or anyone even remotely qualified to give advice on an exercise/diet plan.  What?!  No really, it's true.  This is stuff I've read, heard, or come up with myself.  I won't cite sources, find them yourself.  Talk to a doctor before trying anything, yada yada):

1. Portion control.  If I simply think about how much I put on my plate, I put less on.  If I put less on and finish it, I wait a few minutes before giving myself the option for seconds.  There's a delay between your stomach and your brain, your brain needs a few minute to catch up.  Most of the time my brain catches up and I'm actually full, but I've eaten less than I would have.  
2. You don't have to burn more calories exercising than you eat in a day.  If you do, your body will freak out and start eating muscle rather than fat.  Bad thing.  There's a thing called Basal Metabolic Rate, don't forget that you actually burn calories sitting still, keeping your body working.  This accounts for most of your calories.  So all you've got to do, is burn up the surplus, and then a little more, if you want to actually lose weight.  For most people, this is a few hundred calories, not that bad.
3. Counting daily calories is a pain in the butt and doesn't help.  But being generally aware of how calorie rich a food is is still a good thing.  It helps to know how full of garbage your meal is so you can think about maybe a healthier alternative, or just eat less of it.
4. Sweet things are addictive.  Any sweet things, especially artificial sweets.  Seriously, I read this and I didn't believe it.  I had already stopped drinking sugar soda.  I thought I was being smart and avoiding all that sugar.  Then I read somewhere that the sweetness in artificial sweetener triggers your body to start pumping insulin, which shows up to the party only to find that the sugar isn't there.  Your stomach then tells your brain it had better send some damn sugar down or it's gonna get ugly, you then crave sugary things.  I quit drinking soda altogether, and suddenly, I didn't want nearly as many sweets.  By not eating sweets, it got easier to not eat sweets.  I never realized how much sugar I was actually eating till I stopped.
5. I love coffee.  A cup of coffee a half hour before a workout can help you push a little harder and a little farther than you might.  Make it a straight up coffee or espresso, not some sugary "coffee drink" from Fivebucks.  Put a spoon of sugar and milk in it if you like.  Real sugar has about 15 calories per spoonful.  You'll burn that off again and then some during your workout.  Watch out for dehydration though, caffeine makes you pee...
6. Dehydration can kick your butt.  You've really gotta watch it.  Get a little dehydrated and you can suffer through an average workout.  It actually increases your perception of fatigue, that sounds fun doesn't it?  Don't rely on sports drinks to stay hydrated, they have more sugar than you need.  If you're working out less than an hour, drink water.  Otherwise your sports drink can negate your workout.  Too much water can kill you though, careful...
7. Fiber.  Yeah, I'm going there.  Fiber is hard to digest, so you actually burn more calories when you eat more fiber.  All kinds of awesome food has lots of fiber.  Kashi breakfast cereals are delicious, and full of fiber and protein.  Careful though, prunes and apricots can be dangerous...  in ways that lead back to dehydration...  Prunes and apricots have about the same fiber, and also have potassium which is something you need when working out to help prevent cramping.
8. Excercise is an appetite suppressant.  If I eat after a good workout, I'm less hungry, get full faster, and I eat less.  Uh, win, win, win, there.
9. Don't start working out too hard.  You're all psyched to work out and get fit again, it's been a few days (maybe weeks, months) since you really got to it.  You work out, you work long, you work hard.  In reality you didn't go that long or hard, you're out of shape.  But you kicked your own butt and now you're in too much pain to do it again the next day.  Days go by, you keep waiting to feel "ready" again.  You may never.  Start easy, easier than you want to.  Then ramp it up as you find your limits.
10. Sleep is good.  Your body needs to repair when you are asking it to change.  You don't build muscle while working out, you build it while you sleep, AFTER you workout.  Getting solid Z's helps you rebuild, gives you more energy to start fresh, and makes you feel better in general, you can't fool your body, it's not stupid.  It knows when you aren't getting enough sleep and it retaliates by making you too tired to workout again.

BikeGen, Stage 1: Increasing Output

Well, my idea that decreasing resistance on the alternator output line from the 3Ω would increase output seems to be valid, though I still don't understand why.  I went back to RadioShack and picked up four more 10Ω 10w resistors. I put them in parallel on the output line and started pedaling, as soon as the alternator's field cut in, 1.75A flowed out and I was still pedaling easily.  With my ultimate target of about 100w captured, this level of output was about 21% of the way there.  To get this I put six 10Ω 10w resistors and one 8Ω 20w resistor all in parallel for a total of ~1.38Ω of resistance and up to 90w of power dissipation.  So far, no one has been able to explain to me why this reduces the load on the alternator and I haven't found anything that helps me make sense of it.

Turns out that the rheostat that I burned up was only half burned up.  I was able to wire up the other pole on it and get dialable resistance the other way.  This way actually makes more sense anyway, clockwise decreases resistance (Ω) and increases how hard it is to pedal.  With the rheostat in place, I was just about to commence testing when one of the connections shorted out.  This caused the wires to go red hot almost instantly, burning all the coverings off in the process.  Oops.

Luckily, I didn't fry the alternator, or myself.  This did serve as a good reminder that I'm dealing with a very powerful source of electricity, and that it really was time to clean up my wiring and reduce the number of exposed terminals I had.  Also, I really should get around to putting some more fuses inline...

Here we are, post-cleanup:

With this arrangement and my trusty wife assisting by turning the rheostat, I was able to dial the power output from 1.75A, all the way up to 9A.  This was major, major progress.  However, the high output quickly fell off down closer to 5A.  My theory on that is that I'm still overheating the rheostat, causing the resistance to increase.  I was able to dial in the resistance to a level I could sustain for a good workout this morning though.   So my final numbers at this point are sustained output of 2.35A or 28w, enough to power a big CFL light bulb and 28% of my hopeful goal.  The total theoretical resistance on the line now is about ¼ Ω, but I think that's increasing with heat so I don't have a great way of measuring that yet.  I'm feeling good about the resistor situation, once I get the resistance dialed in, or adjustable to reliable levels, I'll rewire everything up into a control box I can mount on the handlebars.  I also see the need to minimize the mechanical loss coming on down the line, so I've got some thinking to do there too.

BikeGen, Stage 1: Measuring Output

After testing the current with the fuses last night, I figured there was no way I could possibly be producing more than 10 amps of output from the alternator with those resistors in place, so put my multimeter inline (ammeter mode) and started cranking.  I worked out for about a half hour keeping my heart rate at about the 85% level again.  Throughout that time I produced no less than 0.85A of current.  So in sum I was able to harness about 1/10th of what I should be able to produce, or about 0.425Ah.  At this rate it will take forever to recharge the car battery.  I was however able to charge my iPod while riding.  Producing enough juice to rock out was definitely cool, even if the amount of juice was tiny.

Next up, decreasing the resistance by adding more resistors in parallel.  RadioShack, here I come.  I totally love that RadioShack is also sponsoring Lance's team this year.  It makes buying parts for this project extra fitting.  I'll probably pick up a few more of these, which will get the total resistance down into the low 1Ω range and should also help to cool the dissipation of the heat (even thought he three that are on there now don't seem to get hot).  I also need a way to wire these up a little cleaner, I've got these resistors seriously kludged together right now.  Hopefully they will have some euro-style terminals at The Shack too.

BikeGen Stage 1: Is there an EE in the house?

I'm just gonna put it out there that I didn't do so hot in Physics at college.  I did get  B+ the second time around though...  In my flailing around, I ended up finding that placing resistors on my alternator output (rather than the field charging wire) would allow me to pedal with a low resistance level on the nearly dead battery.  I still haven't had a chance to charge it up full to try pedaling it at full charge.  In one attempt to find the proper level of resistance (Ω) to put on the line, I did burn up a rheostat, which was kind of cool in the setting-fire-to-electronics sort of way.  So what I've got right now is a set of three resistors, two 10Ω 10w and one 8Ω 20w all wired up in parallel on the alternator output line.  With this setup, I was able to ride for a full hour, keeping my heart rate at at about the 85% mark where I like it, and was able to increase the voltage measured at the battery during that time.  It went from 12.0v to 12.5v with no load other than the battery and the resistors, this of course started dropping as soon as I stopped pedaling because I really wasn't putting out that much juice so I was just affecting the surface charge.


Now back to those resistors.  I am a smart enough cookie to figure out that in parallel they make 3.0769Ω of resistance.  And I think they are capable of dissipating a combined total of 40w.  What I don't get at all is why in the hell that works to make the load easier.  I would have thought that increasing the resistance on the alternator output line would make it harder to pedal by causing a voltage drop that would be sensed by the alternator which would then try to work harder to make power.  But I guess this just demonstrates that there's something I definitely do not understand at work here.  I put the rheostat in the resistors' spot yesterday, that's when I burned it up, it could only handle 3w.  Burning electronic components smell really bad.  I think what I need is less resistance on the line.  With the rheostat I found by placing higher resistance on the line I could pedal easier, and with low resistance, there was a point where all of a sudden it was like hitting a brick wall.  So it seems a low ohm, resistor capable of dissipating something less than 40w is what I need, maybe.  I definitely don't know how to calculate what that is exactly.  I tried putting a small incandescent bulb inline to see what would happen, and the answer is absolutely nothing.  The bulb lights up and then the system never makes power.  So at the moment I'm stuck with my resistors.  Here's what it looks like now:

Just for kicks, I removed the resistors from the line, and replaced them with a 5a fuse, just to see if I was able to put more than 5a down that line.  The answer was definitely yes.  As soon as the alternator powered up, POP.  I replaced that with a 15a fuse which is more than I should be able to produce and it was, the 15a fuse remained intact.  If I had a 10a fuse I'd try that, cause if it worked, then I would be safe plugging my multimeter into the output wire to measure the current outflow.  Can't guarantee that yet though so I don't want to risk the meter.  Though I probably should wire some fuses into this thing...


So I'm kind of stuck, a little.  Another site I've come across says that that a 25Ω 25w rheostat on the field charging line will work, this I am skeptical of because the 25Ω 3w rheostat I tried didn't do anything at all, it was like it wasn't even there.  I'm more wondering what a smaller Ω rheostat with that higher wattage would do on the alt output line side.  Another diagram I found shows a fixed 0.47Ω 25w resistor on the alt output with a switch enabling a second one in parallel.  This is more along the lines of what I am wanting to try.  I would definitely appreciate some help in making sense of why the resistors seem to work where they do.

Stage 1: Tweaking

By "tweak", what I really mean is flail around trying random crap I find on the Intarwebz till something works.  The resistance problems I've got are so far pretty significant.  By resistance, I don't mean electrical resistance measured in Ohms (though I've been learning about those too), but rather how hard it is to turn the alternator when the field is powered up.  To which the answer is very.  I actually slightly strained a hamstring trying to crank it over once the field juices up and starts making power.

A friend of mine from college suggested that I may not have a functioning diode in the alternator, which made sense to me, but I was able to disprove that using the diode test mode in my multimeter.  My next idea was that the load being drawn by the battery is very high due to the battery being mostly discharged.  The voltage in my Battery is so low that it's was basically flat.  Connecting it to my car's battery in parallel to charge it up got me up to around 75% charge.  The load is still too great to sustain pedaling.  This is a major problem since part of this idea is that I would be able to at least partially discharge the battery and recharge it.  If this theory is correct, I would only be able to draw as much as I could put out instantaneously, since recharging the battery grinds me to a halt.  So I need a way to limit the load.

I found some kids at MIT that tried to use an Alt driven by bike wheel deriving the cranking power from a Ghatta, which is a type of water driven millstone in Nepal.  They found they needed to modify the field current with resistors in parallel to bring the current to the Alt field down.  That didn't seem to do anything useful with the resistors I tried.  These guys also made me realize I'd been driving my alternator backwards...  I fixed that, and still no love (and I hope that didn't mess any of the internals up).  Then I found some Brits that say you put the resistors on the Alt output line to bring down the load, though I have to admit, I don't see how that would do it at all.  But that's my next try.  Also, I will attempt to further charge my battery up to full to see if a full battery lightens the load.

Stage 1: First Serious Test

Well, I've already broken some guidelines. I did pay $0 for the alternator and the battery, that's a major component of the expense of this project. But in order to drive the thing, I needed a belt, a long belt. It had to be up in the neighborhood of 83" and be able to fit in the skinny little pulleys that were stock on the alternator. Getting a free belt didn't seem very likely to me so I decided to just choke down the cost. After describing what I needed to the dudes at Pep Boys, then explaining what I was building out of the alternator, and how I was not actually crazy (not sure if they bought that one from the looks I got), they helpfully sent me to Napa, where you can get get belts for ride-on lawn mowers and other machinery type equipment. The guy at Napa was very apologetic that they didn't have an 83" belt in stock, and hesitantly offered me an 84" belt, I told him that the precision of the length was not that important since the machine it was for, hadn't been designed yet! The $25 cost was actually covered by some earmarked cash I got for Christmas. The expensive part was the wiring bits and bobs I got at Pep Boys. I got a few rolls of 10g and 14g wire ($5 a piece), a couple switches ($4 a piece), some marine battery clamp terminals ($4) and several boxes of wire terminals in various sizes and gauges. This added up pretty quick. I will only actually use a fraction of the wire and terminals, but if I was going to wire cleanly and for the long term, I needed to source these. So oddly enough, I spent more on wiring parts than I did on the Battery ($0), Alternator ($0), and Belt ($25), combined. The devil is in the details, as it were.

Next came the base. I needed to firmly mount the alternator on a tensionable hinge. Using a couple small piece of scrap plywood and a scrap 2x4, I came up with a mount that would butt up against my existing stationary trainer, would use the weight of the battery to keep it down, and a turnbuckle to keep tension on the belt. Luckily my alternator has an integrated mount designed to be a hinge for tensioning, so this was actually pretty easy. I first tried to use just the weight of the alternator to keep tension, but quickly found that this was no good.

It resulted in voltage spikes and drops as well as extremely uneven resistance at the pedals in some preliminary testing. The addition of the turnbuckle was key.

So with the base unit pretty much in place, I wired everything up. I used the wiring diagram from P2cycles.com as a guide to put all the connections in place, my thanks to them for providing such a clear diagram. Hopefully, I will eventually have all of the trick connections in place down the line to measure power and have the bar mounted switches as they did in their very sexy implementation.

Then it was time for a test. As an afterthought, I wired up some leads that would allow me to more easily read the multimeter while pedaling, and also hooked up some leads to an inverter, to which I plugged in my iPod. The iPod's battery was completely flat, as a bonus.

Here's the test:

It's a go! I was able to get voltages up around 14.4v while pedaling. What you don't see in the video is my heart rate, which I do have a readout on my handlebars for. Unfortunately, my pulse quickly hit 180, which is basically my max output. I was only able to sustain a cadence >90rpm for about 5 min, and I was completely juiced at the end. I think this is the result of the car battery being almost completely flat, I initially charged it just enough to be able to power the alternator's field. I think the voltage sensor in the alternator is detecting that the battery is low, and putting a heavy field in place to charge up the battery. I'm not sure about this and I need to do a little more research. While I look into it, I'm going to charge the battery up to a higher level, just in case.