Have you ever tried just turning off the TV?

Hazarder

    S srditim glavobolom se zbudim v majhni sobi brez oken. Ne spomnim se, kako sem se znašel tu, a predobro vem zakaj. Že četrtič letos sem v podobni situaciji. Privezan sem na stol in tudi če bi se izvil iz vrvi, vem, da pred vrati najverjetneje stoji gorili podoben človek, ki ga zmede vsaka večstavčna poved. Med čakanjem se prepričujem: »Ubili me že ne bodo, le prestrašiti me hočejo, da se ne vrnem več.« Srčno upam, da bom res odnesel le z modricami ali kakšnim zlomljenim prstom in ne pristanem v intenzivni negi kot pred leti v Milanu. Še vedno me zmrazi, ko pomislim kako blizu sem takrat bil invalidskemu vozičku. Čeprav je bila tisto nesrečna izjema, me vseeno skrbi. Prvič imam opravka s Triadami.

    V Vegasu, Atlantic City-ju ali Monaku sem v nevarnosti takoj, ko me posname kakšna varnostna kamera. Tam vse posnetke obdelajo sistemi za prepoznavanje obrazov in moj skoraj povsod sproži alarm. Zato se raje potepam po svetovnih metropolah, kjer lahko nekaj dni ostanem neopažen in obiščem igralnico ali dve.

    V Hong Kong sem prispel pred tremi dnevi. Legalnih igralnic je tu le za peščico, zato cvetijo manjše lokacije pod okriljem organiziranih kriminalnih združb - Triad. Za igro v njih je potrebno vabilo, a potikanje po igralnicah tega sveta je pomenilo, da sem povsod nekoga poznal. Po dveh dneh telefonskih klicev sem dobil vabilo in še istega večera sem se odpravil v trideseto nadstropje v steklo odete stolpnice. Če ne bi vedel kam se odpravljam, verjetno ne bi opazil, da so bili vsi tam zaposleni nadpovprečno visoki in oblečeni v dražja oblačila, kot bi mogoče pričakoval za Kitajce. Ob tipkanju kode za dostop do nadstropja z igralnico sem se zmotil. Globoko sem vdihnil, ponovno vtipkal kodo in to pospremil z nasmehom proti varnostni kameri. Tokrat se nisem zmotil in še preden se je dvigalo ustavilo sem zaslišal dobro znane zvoke avtomatov, žetonov, vzklike veselja in skozi ves ta trušč ropotanje kroglice na ruleti.

    Že dolgo je bila ruleta moja najljubša igra. Mogoče zato, ker pri njej marsikdo misli, da si lahko s primerno strategijo priigra dobiček. Seveda je z veliko sreče mogoče dobro zaslužiti. Vendar pa, prav tako kot pri ostalih igrah na srečo, dolgoročno vedno samo izgubiš. Dejstvo, ki ga igralnice dobro izkoriščajo, je moč razložiti že z osnovnim znanjem statistike. Potrebno je samo vedeti, da so tudi pri najbolj »varni« stavi na barvo možnosti za zmago manj kot petdeset odstotkov. Mene ta statistika ni odvrnila od igre. Zame so bila pravila drugačna.

    Tudi tokrat sprva nisem stopil k mizi z vrtečo ploščo. Odigral sem nekaj krogov black jack-a in pozorno opazoval druge obiskovalce. Iskal sem strategijo, ki bi zame pomenila čim večji dobiček in hkrati ne bi vzbudila prevelike pozornosti. Kljub izkušnjam, iz katerih bi se moral kaj naučiti, sem ta pristop opustil takoj, ko sem pri ruleti zagledal vitko rjavolasko z bleščečim nasmehom. Noge so me kar same ponesle k mizi in stavil sem na rdečo. Sto dolarjev se je spremenilo v dvesto, nato štiristo, osemsto ... Pri 1600 sem se nekoliko ustavil, saj so štiri zaporedne zmage že pritegnile nekaj pozornosti. Ko sem na drugi strani mize zagledal širok nasmeh in vame uprt pogled pričakovanja, sem pozabil tudi na to zadnjo previdnost. Ob bučnem spodbujanju prisotnih sem žetone samozavestno postavil na črno trinajstico. Čeprav je bila verjetnost za mojo serijo manjša od 0,2 odstotka, sem vedel, da bo čez nekaj sekund pred mano stalo 56 tisoč dolarjev. Preprosto nisem mogel izgubiti. Nikoli nisem izgubil.

    Ob pospravljanju žetonov sem opazil, da me rjavolaska še zmeraj gleda: »Hej, jaz sem Adam, kdo si pa ti?«

    Njen nasmešek se je spremenil v glasen smeh in bil sem nekoliko zbegan. Hitro me je odrešila: »Ne skrbi, nič ni narobe. Smejim se, ker mi je ime Eva.«

    Tudi meni se je na usta prikradel nasmeh. »Kaj pa je tebe prineslo v to luknjo?« sem z resnim obrazom poskušal oponašati junake iz filmov noir.

    Ni odgovorila, le s pogledom je nakazala v smeri bara. Naročila je gin in tonic. Nikoli nisem razumel, zakaj bi kdo gin mešal s čimerkoli, a to mnenje sem zadržal zase. Naročil sem kozarec konjaka Menuet. V bistvu nikoli nisem pil, če pa že, potem le točno tega. Že ob prvem požirku sem okušal oreh sodov, v katerih je zorel in hitro sem se tudi nekoliko sprostil.

    Še vedno me je zanimalo kako se je znašla tukaj, a tudi tokrat se je vprašanju izmuznila in pripomnila: »Kako si vedel, da bo krogla padla na trinajst?«

    Če bi ji povedal resnico bi mislila, da sem zmešan: »Misliš, da kar vsakemu izdam svoje skrivnosti?«

    Spet se je na glas zasmejala: »Kaj pa lahko storiva, da bi meni?«

    »Mogoče bova to zvedela kasneje,« sem poskušal biti duhovit. Najini pogledi so se pogosto srečevali in počutil sem se kot mladenič na prvem zmenku.

    Prijetne občutke je že v naslednjem trenutku pretrgalo to, kako zelo me je spominjala na Ano. Izgled, inteligenca, kretnje, duhovitost ... vse kar me je privlačilo, me je čisto preveč spominjalo tudi na Anino drugo stran. Tisto stran, ki je popolnoma obrnila moje življenje.

    Ano sem spoznal pri sedemnajstih. Hodila sva v isto šolo in skoraj vsak dan sem jo videl na hodniku. Ob bežnih srečanjih sem prvič opazil znake svoje posebne sposobnosti. Ob priložnostih, ko bi jo lahko ogovoril, se mi je zdelo, kot da se trenutek ponavlja. Kakor da dobivam dodatne priložnosti, da bi končno kaj zinil. Dolgo sem te občutke pripisoval neki vrsti déjà vu-ja. Še preden bi jih lahko bolje raziskal je Ana šolo zapustila in skupaj z njo so izginili tudi ponovljeni trenutki.

    Nekaj let kasneje, po preselitvi v večje mesto, je naključje naneslo, da sem Ano ponovno srečal na neki zabavi. Zelo sem bil presenečen in tudi vesel, ko je stopila do mene in me vprašala ali sva slučajno skupaj hodila v šolo. Zapletla sva se v dolg pogovor, ki se je končal komaj pri njej doma. Celoten večer je bil poln igrivih pogledov in nežnih dotikov. Naslednje jutro sva oba vedela, da je to komaj začetek dolge zgodbe.

    Ana je bila inteligentna punca, ki so jo mučili demoni iz otroštva. Nestabilne družinske razmere je sama občutila predvsem v obliki neljubeče, nasilne in pretirano stroge mame. Kar je naredila, nikoli ni bilo dovolj dobro. Kot najstnica je bila že prav vesela, če so posledice maminega nezadovoljstva in frustracij bile samo modrice. Ni bilo vedno tako. Vse to je pustilo posledice. Čeprav sem jo sam poznal predvsem kot veselo in srečno punco, sem postopoma opazil, da pred svetom skriva globoke rane, ki jih sama ni znala pozdraviti.

    Na občasne izbruhe žalosti sem se skozi leta navadil in pomagal sem, kolikor sem lahko. Ko se je hotela sama udariti, sem ji zadržal roko, če je grdo govorila o sebi, sem ji govoril o tem, kako jo vidim jaz. Vseeno me nič ni moglo pripraviti na dan, ko sem vstopil v dnevno sobo in je Ana v rokah držala nož. Ko me je zagledala je rekla samo: »Žal mi je.« Nato pa si je prerezala vrat in iz njega je bruhnila kri ...

    Trenutek se je nenadoma ponovil in zakričal sem: »Ne!« Ni pomagalo ...

    Ponovno sem vstopil v sobo in rekel: »Ne, rad te imam.«

    Ana je odgovorila: »Jaz tebe tudi, ravno zato ...«

    Vseeno je bilo kaj sem rekel, konec je bil vsakič enak. Ob zadnji ponovitvi sem izbral najboljše besede, ki sem se jih lahko spomnil: »Upam, da boš zdaj srečna.«

    Travmatična izkušnja mi je pomagala odkriti celoten potencial mojih sposobnosti, a me je istočasno tudi usmerila na mojo samouničevalno pot.

    Hrup pred vrati je prekinil obujanje spominov in razmišljanje o tem, zakaj sem se znašel v tej sobi. Vrata so se sunkovito odprla in v sobo je pridrvel majhen Kitajec v dragi obleki, ki je na hitro nekaj zamrmral. V naslednjem trenutku je izpod suknjiča potegnil pištolo in me brez opozorila ustrelil v prsi. Začutil sem pekočo bolečino, ki ni bila primerljiva z ničemer, kar sem v življenju kdaj doživel ...

    Vrata so se sunkovito odprla in takoj sem začel moledovati za življenje in se opravičevati za storjeno, a na prišleka to ni imelo nobenega učinka. Ponovno pekoča bolečina ...

    Vrata so se sunkovito odprla, prevrnil sem stol na katerem sem sedel, a metek me je vseeno zadel. Bolečina ...

...

    Vrata so se že stotič sunkovito odprla in tokrat sem, čeprav jih nisem razumel, že dobro poznal izgovorjene besede - wǒmen bù róngrěn piànzi ...

    Vrata so se sunkovito odprla in besede, ki jih ne bom nikoli razumel, sem slišal še preden so bile izgovorjene. Poskusil sem že vse, opravičila, jok, vpitje, druge jezike ... Zmanjkovalo mi je idej. Ponovno bolečina ...

    Vrata so se sunkovito odprla in pomislil sem na Evo. Zaradi absurda, da je ravno Eva zapečatila mojo usodo, sem se naslednjih nekaj ponovitev smejal. Tudi to ni vplivalo na mojega rablja ...

    Vrata so se sunkovito odprla, že zdavnaj sem nehal šteti ...

I used the toner transfer method to etch my own circuit boards. I don't have an electronics background so until now I never used any software to draw circuits. But this one (especially the one for the display) was complicated enough that drawing by hand made no sense. The other positive side effect is, that now I have designs that are reproducible. Using hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide to etch the copper was also quite fun:) The results are not perfect, but they work:

After etching the main task was to drill the holes and to solder the vias(connections between the two sides of the PCB). After that soldering everything in place was easy. The components I used are more or less the same as in the first/second prototype.

As seen on the picture above the display has a funky looking battery. That is actually a 18650 li-ion battery. The display is the one part of the system that uses the most power so it makes some sense to make it rechargeable. One can buy really cheap microUSB chargers for those batteries. At 3000+mAh they also pack quite a bit of energy. Unfortunately the 3-4V this battery produces are not enough to drive the arduino(6+V for unregulated supply) and the display(8+V). To get the 8V I needed a step-up voltage converter and again ebay and china had a cheep solution. A full battery is capable of driving the display for up to 4 hours. But since during usage it often turns of(inactivity) we get multiple trainings from one charge. For the trip sensors I decided to leave the 6 AA batteries per sensor. The power consumption on those devices is really low and for me the complexity of adding the charger was not worth it. To determine when the batteries are running low I added a red LED diode that turns on if that is the case. For now this has not occurred:D

The third prototype now looks like this.

As you can see the reflectors are mounted on nicer looking tripods that I got here. The legs are aluminum so it was easy to cut them to a more suitable length.

Since the stopwatch has to be transported I also constructed a nice little box for that.

Made from cardboard and protected with a layer of duct tape. For now it works quite well :)

Some more shots of the finished prototype:

I ordered an Arduino from a Chinese retailer on Ebay. It cost the staggering amount of $4. Using the Arduino is actually quite easy if you have any programming knowledge. It basically enables you to write programs in C that are compiled and can run on the device where they have access to the ports on it. The community around the Arduino is quite big and helpful. Anyone interested should start on the Arduino homepage.

To make the micro-controller do interesting stuff I had to attach something to it. From the beginning I decided I wanted to use a laser that shines on some kind of sensor and when the light beam is interrupted I can read that in my program. Since I didn't have a clue how exactly to do that I searched the internets for example projects. So my first version of the laser trip-wire was based on this instructables. It is really simple and it does its job without an micro-controller. But since I had the Arduino and there were also ideas to make it wireless I only used the resistance divider idea and feed the output to one of the Arduinos' analog inputs.

And that was basically it. I built two sensors, put them in plastic boxes connected them with UTP cable and calculated the time between the beam interruption on the first and second sensor. To display this I also soldered together 3 7-segment LED displays. How to do that I learned here. This kind of worked, but the readings on the sensor were really sensitive to changes in ambient light and therefore it was hard to calibrate the reading so I could know when the laser really was interrupted. To mend this I wired the laser to and Arduino port and periodically turned it on and of(very fast). Now I could mostly discard the changes in lighting and only search for the periodic change. If the change would be absent it meant that the laser beam is interrupted. This approach had a lot of potential but I got to learn that a photo-resistor is not the best element to use. It has some memory effect and therefore when the laser goes of the reading is not instantly lower but it kind of fades. After researching the matter it was obvious that I would be better off using a photo-transistor. The response time of these devices is faster(a lot). After doing this my first prototype worked mostly as expected.

I should also mention that since I put the laser on the same side as the sensor I needed to reflect the beam back to detect it. First I tried to use a mirror but that was a nightmare to set up and aim the reflection at the sensor. In a quick chat with Musti he told me that I could use a regular bike reflector. Those things are designed to reflect light in the direction it came from. That really worked much better than I would have expected. I did also learn that using IR light would probably be better but I made it work with lasers and lasers are cool:)

The problem with this design was, that the cables made it a bit impractical and the display was to small to see it from bigger distances. After some persuasion from my teams skip I decided to research how to send data wirelessly from an Arduino.

As it turns out a cheap wireless transceiver for it exists. The nRF24L01 based component can be bought for less than $2 on Ebay. It sends and receives data on the 2.4GHz band(same as WiFi). It has basic error correction and most important, there is an Arduino library for it.

To make the whole system wireless I needed two more Arduinos and three nRF24L01 transceivers. I bought them again form China. The components work and are cheap. The only downside is that every order takes 2 to 3 weeks to come in.

Since every trip sensor now needed its own batteries I bought bigger plastic housings. The new display was even bigger so the housing for it was the biggest one. Actually wiring up the Transceivers was easy. The sensor boxes with the Arduinos are really simple in design. The few components are all wired together on a simple prototype board.

The new bigger display is a bit more complicated but luckily I found an insructable that explained exactly what I needed. The LED displays I use are 5.7cm high and need around 10V to turn on. For powering the display I use a rechargeable 12V Li-ion battery also made in China.

I am very happy with the way it all came together in the end. Except for a glitch(mostly programing related) here and there it works like a charm and I hope that it will help us with our training.

The C code used on the three Arduinos is available on GitHub. It is probably not the most readable but I will still be happy if I get bug reports:)

Since the main reason to go this way was to save money I think I succeeded. It cost me less than 150€ to built it and I have learned a lot about how to work with the Arduino.

This is probably not the end. I am thinking about how to save the times during training and later evaluate our progress.

Since we play at a level where live reporting is not really existent I had the idea to develop a simple mechanism that would enable anyone to see live scores of our games. In the pursuit to keep our web page as simple as possible I developed a small spin-off page that is used to manage scores of our games. It is on-line here.

Since the main page is static we didn't already have a place where we could simply store the game data. My solution was to use a Github Gist to store a scoreboard layout placeholder and JSON objects that represent games. Whit the data in place some basic client side javascript can fetch it and render the scoreboard.

With this the tool enables us to include score boards in our news posts and they will be update as things progress during the game. Like the one here :)

Naturally you still need someone that will enter the results as they happen for this to function as intended.

As for the scoreboard above. It will go live on September 6th in the evening.

On our 10th anniversary I somehow felt the urge to do something with what I had. Since I bought the bike the Garry Fisher brand faded in to the Garry Fisher collection under the Trek brand name and for me that is very sad. Fisher bikes always had something special, like the "Work and no play is no good at all" steerer cap and the "mans best friend" logo at the bottom of the seat-post tube. But the best part was the feeling that you ride something that has its roots at the very beginning of mountain biking.

Enough of my blabbing! I started with a stripped down frame.

As it was my plan to use disc brakes I pulled out my trusty Dremel and removed the V-brake mounts. Trying hard not to cut into the frame tubing.

The cable guides were laid out for three bare wires on the top tube so I had to make space for a thicker disc brake cable. Again with the Dremel.

After all that I brought the frame to a local powder coat shop that sanded the frame and covered it in a nice new blue coat. All for 40 Euros. Most of the needed components I got from Ebay. But one that was hard to get at a normal price was a disc brake mount adapter. Since at the time I bought the bike Fisher was already a brand under Trek, it used the same weird weight lowering idea where they did not weld a rear disc break mount to a disc ready frame. They just left three holes through which you could mount an adapter that then fits a disc brake caliper.

As the original headset was crap I bought a new one. It was not an expensive one, but based on Internet reviews a sturdy one. FSA The Pig is meant to take a lot of beating for a low price.

The next step was the new fork. As I can say now the Rock Shox Reba that I bought is from a different galaxy than the Jett. Quite unbelievable that it is made by the same firm. Before assembly I also sprayed the Bontrager crowbar steerer to a mate black and bought new lock-on grips.

The most challenging part of this build were the wheels. Since I needed new hubs for the disc brakes I decided I want to keep the spokes and rims I had to save money and at the same time to learn how to build wheels. I got front and rear Shimano SLX hubs and painted the rims mate black. After some Internet tutorials and some trial and error I managed to build some nice wheels. Not the lightest pair around but still under 2 kilos for the pair.

The other new components were Shimano XT disc brakes with XT rotors (160mm back 180mm front) and a fizik saddle (a steal on Ebay). The sram 7 cassette, the Shimano crank-set, the seat post and the Deore shifters and derailleurers stayed stock since they work great. The final touch was the gf logo up front. I am still deciding if I want to spray a Garry Fisher text on the bottom tube. The idea was to use this design, but the jury is still out. The most important part is, that the bike rides and handles unbelievably well and I can't wait to put it trough its paces.

And for the end some pictures of the finished bike.