An Openmoko bike ride

Posted by Chris Ball Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:19:00 GMT

I've been having fun with new purchases recently: a new bike, and a Neo Freerunner phone from Openmoko. The phone is also my first GPS, and it's doing a fine job as one:

A bike-mounted Freerunner


Software for the Openmoko has come a long way since the previous model, with a pretty large community of developers building up. (I've tried to do my part by writing a patch to fix the touchscreen when the screen's rotated into landscape mode.) I'm particularly pleased with tangoGPS, which uses data from OpenStreetMap and has some great features: you can zoom out to enclose an area and ask it to download all of the map tiles inside that area for offline viewing, up to a specified zoom level (so, I now have map images for most of Massachusetts sitting on my SD card). You can also publish your current location and get a moving map of friends. It's written by a single developer, and I'd suggest making a donation to the project if you're using it — think about how much such an app might cost if it were running on the iPhone instead of the Freerunner!

The bike mount in the photo above is an Arkon CM927, which I don't recommend very highly; I've had the phone come off it (without major damage, which is good) twice now while riding over rough road. It should probably be strapped in separately, but that makes the whole thing less convenient. Let me know if you know of any better cell phone mounts.

Okay, on to the bike ride, which happened yesterday. It was a beautiful day, and we rode from Quincy Center to the beaches at Hull and back, with a few extra-fit people riding from Somerville to Quincy at the start. Here's a photo of the group:

At the base of Hull Wind 1


We've taken the ferry back into Boston harbor twice now (once from Salem and this time from Quincy) and the trip and harbor look fantastic around sunset.

Finally, here's a photo from tangogps:

Leaving Quincy Harbor on the ferry

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  1. Avatar Fotoalba said about 6 hours later:

    Hehe, it seems a little bit geek, but its really fun, an openmoko on a bike :)

    I've bought a phone from openmoko last week too, but i hadn't time to test it.

  2. Avatar josch said about 10 hours later:

    well... i have a better bike mount for my neo1973. i made it myself out of a piece of thermoplast. I cut it out with a fretsaw and bent it over a candle until it fit my neo perfectly. Now it is impossible for the neo to fall out of it - even if i would turn my bike upside down, since it will only slide out of the mount when i disconnect the gps antenna and usb charging cable. here are some pictures and a drawing as svg: http://rabenfrost.net/openmoko/bikemount/ cheers josch

  3. Avatar rodrigo@gnome-db.org said about 10 hours later:

    If you want/can spend some money, have a look at http://www.touratech.com (it's for motorbikes but they sell bike mounts also) or http://www.ram-mount.com/

    They have good mounts for all kind of GPS/PDA/Phones

    Also, please make sure you record your tracks and upload them to http://openstreetmap.org :-)

  4. Avatar desNotes said about 10 hours later:

    It looks great! What release for OpenMoko are you using? I recently received my OpenMoko and am going through the steps to bring it to life and install an image.

  5. Avatar Jeff Stedfast said about 13 hours later:

    Heh, I think I may have seen you guys...

    (I live in Quincy)

  6. Avatar Chris said about 14 hours later:

    It looks great! What release for OpenMoko are you using?

    I'm using the FSO milestone 2 release at the moment.

  7. Avatar petr said about 14 hours later:

    Is it possible to read sunlit display during ride or is displa contrast too low for that?

  8. Avatar Chris said about 15 hours later:

    Is it possible to read sunlit display during ride or is displa contrast too low for that?

    The contrast's too low in sunlight. It works well in shade, and it's just about visible in sunlight if you pull over and peer at it, but it's not readable while moving in sunlight.

    If that's an issue, hooking up voice prompts through something like navit might help.

  9. Avatar Craig said about 17 hours later:

    Unfortunately, I can't get the GPS device in my FreeRunner to work at all (it never gets a fix). Have you had any trouble with that?

  10. Avatar Chris said about 19 hours later:

    Unfortunately, I can't get the GPS device in my FreeRunner to work at all (it never gets a fix). Have you had any trouble with that?

    No, I think I've been lucky. There are two things it could be:

    • some people have reported bad soldering on the internal GPS antenna, which would stop you getting a fix. My phone seems fine.
    • if you have an SD card plugged in, you should upgrade to a kernel that contains Andy Green's SD clock workaround.
  11. Avatar Flüge said about 1 month later:

    that´s an awesome. I am searching for an clamp for may nokia n95, because it also hase a navigation mode. Unfortunately the battery is stressed a lot in this mode, but it´s better than to lose one´s way.

  12. Avatar Apoman said 7 months later:

    I can't get the GPS device to work neither. Upgrading didn't help me. I'm pretty clueless.

  13. Avatar Moped said 10 months later:

    It's great to have GPS in your phone! You can't get lost, wherever you are. ;) As I can imagine it's very useful at a bike tour, too. Built-in GPS receivers in mobile phones are the future, and today already many of such phones are available.

  14. Avatar Modellbau Autos said 11 months later:

    It looks great! What release for OpenMoko are you using? I recently received my OpenMoko and am going through the steps to bring it to life and install an image

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