[Hackability] Hello and welcome!

[Liz Henry]

Hello, accessibility hackers!   Thanks for joining the list!

Please feel free to invite people to it - it is an open list. Though
everyone on it so far is in the SF Bay Area I expect more people will join.

I'd love to see us have a meetup and fix or hack something in the next
month, maybe on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.  I'd set up the middle
classroom (Turing) at Noisebridge to do this.  If someone had a good
idea to do something we could all give feedback and help out or just
watch and take notes.  I am interested in documenting any sort of mods
just so that there can be that much more public information on
wc/powerchair/scooter hacking.

Part of my motivation in starting this list (and hack days in person)
comes from the thoughts I talked about a couple of years ago at various
technical and open source conferences.  Here is the short version of one
of those talks (slides and a transcript)

http://www.slideshare.net/lizhenry/ignite-oscon-your-flying-jetpack-1802527

Other plans: I'm going to write up a blog post with photos of the cool
scooter hack that Zach helped me with last weekend. We bypassed the
safety cut-off mechanism and added a switch, so that I can turn on the
switch to go forward.  Or, I can turn off the switch and use the already
existing control lever to go forward.  The lever and the switch both
respond to the speed controls.  So, basically I now have cruise control
on my mobility scooter.

I have more to do to add a usb charger to my scooter (which I'm hoping
Zach will help me with)  I'm also thinking of putting some LEDs and an
arduino (with mini-USB interface to program it) in the dashboard as well
(which I feel fairly confident to do myself.)

This week I talked with the electric bike shop folks on Cortland to ask
them if they had any thoughts on regenerative braking on scooters and
wheelchairs -- so that our batteries would recharge while we go
downhill.  They gave me a super nice overview of how the regenerative
brakes work and who makes them.  Apparently Bionix is the  main
manufacturer of regenerative brakes for direct drive motors, but they
are kind of the Apple of the bike motor world in that they are
secretive/proprietary about their technology.  Rabbit Tool was suggested
as a company that may be more open to information sharing and they make,
or used to make, geared hub motors with regeneration capability. They
suggested talking to a guy named Lyen who is in SF and also Terry at
hitekbikes.  While I don't know much about motors myself, I like the
idea of connecting with some knowledgeable bike people to talk about
possibilities and see if anyone wants to experiment in this area.



Best,

Liz






-- 

------------------------
Liz Henry
liz at bookmaniac.org
http://bookmaniac.org

"Without models, it's hard to work; without a context, difficult to
evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak." -- Joanna Russ