Geek Scooter Project

Jared Bouck — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:49:00 GMT

A year ago we had the opportunity to produce a promotional product for one of our clients using a new vino scooter and some geek know-how. The end result was a rolling system capable of long distance war driving, GPS navigation, Skype calls on the road as well as recording your favorite TV program so you don’t miss Lost because you are lost. This is just an overview of the project. It covers a lot, but we will be producing a full how to article so check back soon!

Bench testing the computer: The ITX form factor is really a great platform to work with. It's small, compact, feature- filled, and is a low power consumer. Due to the low wattage consumption, we were able to pack a 1 GHZ system into this scooter easily without worrying about the heat output from the VIA CPU.

Here we are doing some custom acrylic work to create the “Brain Frame” to hold all the components of this system. Working with acrylic is very easy if you have the right tools for the job. Make sure your tools and blades are specifically for plastics or acrylic so you don’t have to worry about cracking the material.

The assembled Brain Frame. Using this vertical form factor we were able to put a ton of equipment into a small space very easily. Building a lot of servers and systems in house, we always have a plethora of screws and mounting posts left over. Using a 1/8th drill bit, we marked and drilled holes for all the parts and simply screwed in a motherboard post in the acrylic. We were able to get the motherboard, Power supply, power distribution, access point, FM tuner, WIFI Card, blue tooth, USB hub, USB Camera, Electric Guitar interface, GPS, LCD Readout and PVR TV tuner all in this small space without any trouble.

The first major step in assembling this project is the tear down. We latterly striped this scooter down to the frame. Almost every major body part had some custom work done to it to facilitate all the gadgets in this project.

Here at the rear of the bike you can see we have: extended wireless access point antennas, our jack for our FM antennas, our GPS and 20DB Gain War driving antenna. We choose the Garmin GPS unit primarily for the sync time. It’s the fastest USB receiver we could find when it comes to satellite acquisition.

Jared and Kevin burning the late night oil. We had 2 days of totally construction time in between our normal daily load. Admittedly, it was a very fun and rewarding project for the extra time.

Here we have the USB Camera pointing out of the front of the scooter where the horn normally would be. We simply changed the angle of the horns mounting arm to give us ample room for our USB Camera.

The main install: With the modularity of the brain frame, we were able to just drop this into the scooter and start connecting power and all the accessories and antennas.

The power on test: This is always the point where we get nervous. Yah it worked on the bench, but will it work now that it’s installed? Of course we didn’t have anything to worry about but that doesn’t mean we didn’t hold our breath anyway. Oh, and the bios on this motherboard has an unusual pause on post. So take a deep breath.

So 1:00AM we finished the project. The furry of drilling, cutting, soldering, heat shrinking and rummaging through a mountain of components more or less left the project area a wreck.

So once we got the project finished, we took those final celebratory glamour shots. Pretty sexy right? We had a lot of fun with this project. This is just a teaser of the full project though. So are you thinking of doing something like this on your own? You’re in luck. We will be posting regular updates and providing a full how to article right here at the ThoughtLab blog so you can make your very own geek scooter!

Here is a flyer with all the details of this project. Just click the above image to view it larger.

Product Development

Geek Scooter Project