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BionX + kid seats / trailers /

 

Hi all

Also glad to see this team pop up in Launchpad. Better later than
never ;) Pardon the length of this message, I'm a bit eager to
introduce myself and describe my gear. At this point I am mostly
interested in 1) electric bikes 2) lighting accessories 3) kids gear.

I work at Canonical as a senior support analyst in Montreal QC Canada
since Nov 2006 and I also do some IT consulting on the side mostly
managing some Ubuntu boxes for a few customers and helping out some
local small businesses with their IT.  More about me at:
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/FabianRodriguez

I am a geek for open firmware or hackable electronics, so I'm
interested in the thread about OSS biking computers... read further to
know which computer I'd like to get data from :)

I didn't bike much until last year when we had a major subway strike
in Montreal. Being 50 minutes away from my job in metro+bus and having
2 kids + daycare + my wife's job meant I had to buy a car in 24 hrs.,
spend a fortune in taxi, or get a bike. Well, you guessed right, I got
a bike. I can't even describe the model or any specifics, I just
trusted my dealer and it's been a great ride despite being stolen once
and having a motor replacement once which had me "down" for a month
this year.

I had been reading a lot about electric bikes, compensation motors,
rechargeable traction systems, it had become a new hobby, but I always
ended up looking at BionX systems - http://www.bionx.ca. I was lucky
to be able to try one here in Montreal and I was in love :) The subway
strike was the perfect occasion and fortunately enough we have a great
network of BionX dealers here so my bike was ready in no time.

My daily ride used to be ~30km (round trip), usually a 15 km ride
would take ~50 minutes because of traffic and hills (although Montreal
is mostly flat). Using the BionX system I went down to 35 minutes
average which was nice. Now that I've moved a bit closer to my job my
daily commute is about 12 minutes :) And almost zero effort when I go
up Avenue du Parc for those of you local! The BionX was expensive
relatively to an ordinary bike but nothing compared to buying a car +
expenses and I easily declared that as a business expense. Although
not explicitly hackable, there are good guides on the Internet
documenting how to play with BionX's settings, however I'd love to
hack it to get power for lighting systems and access its data as the
onboard computer doesn't show much - I'll probably elaborate on that
later. If anyone has questions about the BionX system let me know,
I'll be posting some pictures soon.

I've never had an accident so far (Christian, ouch!), thank God! even
though I put 1500KM last year and about the same this year so far,
bike paths are getting better by the day here so that helps. However
not a week goes by without having some close-call, mostly car drivers
that ignore traffic signals so I've learned to anticipate that. I also
believe having kids and a family to go back to gives a different
perspective to riding daily in the city. You stop more, longer :)

This year I also bought two interesting accessories which I love to
hook to my bike and cheat everyone with the BionX motor on :) :
- a child bike trailer very similar to this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Burley-Design-Child-Bicycle-Trailer/dp/B000R9E6LS
- A trail-a-bike extension like this one:
http://www.trail-a-bike.com/images/product/enlarged/folder1-red.jpg

Both of my kids (age 2 and 5) fit in the trailer, and we use the
extension when going for family rides (my wife then takes our smaller
kid on her bike which has a kid seat).

So there, I hope this isn't too boring, looking forward to exchange
more tips with fellow biking Ubunteros :)

Cheers,

Fabian