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Well, last night was the third and final night of Iro Sprints in Chicago at Cobra Lounge. We got off to an eager start around 9:45 and raced 4 up with one advancing in order to rip through the tournament and get on with the real business of the night: setting a record time to immortalize two people and distribute our top prizes. It was probably our most successful night from an organizer's perspective, with absolutely no outages of the equipment that had an effect on results, a timely finish, and a good turnout.



In the first round's first race Ben VanCouvering SMASHED his old record. Coming into the race he had 15.698 seconds and he left it with 15.461 seconds.


The women's first round races were slightly less eventful, Hannah, Laura and Amanda took their races but no one managed to Amanda's record from the second night: 18.371.

Deuce, a former Chicagoan, was in town from San Francisco repping the Godspeed Courier Race Team. During his race however, he and his opponents cavorted and playfully decided to race one-legged. The joke was truly on him however, when he won the one-footed race and had to advance to the next round! Brandon, Ben and Jeff Perkins all met Deuce in the second round and when the race was over both Ben and Brandon broke yet another record, however Brandon won it with 15.178 and Ben VC had a time of 15.188, only one HUNDREDTH of a second behind. Josh Hughes won his race again, and Josh and Brandon both elected to take a breather before their finals.


We raced the women's championship next, and Amanda won the tournament and set a new record that would stand for the rest of the night: 18.321 second. Word is Amanda has been training constantly for Iro Sprints, doing intervals and using floor model trainers during downtime at her job wrenching at Kozy's in Lincoln Park.

While Brandon and Josh continued to rest up we recruited people who wanted to try to set a record. Ben VanCouvering (the man who held the record for most of the series up until about 5 minutes earlier) immediately stormed up to the stage. He gave an AMAZING effort, and got within less than one tenth of a second of Brandon.

When Brandon and Josh got up there, they BOTH smashed Brandon's previously held record. They really spun it and it was quite an exciting race where only the computer's 36,000 times a second accuracy could actually tell if Brandon, Josh, or Brandon's ghost time was in the lead. Unfortunately a bug in the code caused it to be a bit anti-climactic, but after analysis of the logs they had set new time records: Brandon with 14.979 and Hughej with 15.081. Commendations to Josh, that's just a tenth of a second behind Brandon, and nearly a full tenth of a second ahead of the previous record set by Brandon. For his consolation prize, he got all of the usual swag from Planet Bike, Swobo and Rapha, plus a very nice bag from PAC.


Brandon and Amanda, congrats on winning a frame from Iro. Here they are posing with the super special frog trophy:

OK I  made quite a few inroads today on the general administrative side of opensprints, particularly the website.

Wiki

 The wiki is crashing pretty frequently. I've set up a fresh wiki at a different URL so those of you who are trying to develop a setup right now can do it. Stay tuned to that wiki where Luke is going to post his instructions for the PCBs soon.

Forums

So Jon was kind enough to set up forums just under a year ago, but during the spring they fell into disuse. I totally failed, because I never logged on to check for new user requests, and in the process the forums continued to go unused. Hell I even forgot the administrator password. Well, no more, I fetched my password and today a bunch of people have been approved and a bunch of people are administrators on the forum so new user requests will not sit idly waiting for me.

RSS Feeds

We have RSS! Please drop this URL into you feedreader. You can also find this on the lefthand navigation.

• For each interface board included, I packaged (4) 4-40 1/4" flathead screws for mounting the board to the plastic enclosure.
• Each shipment comes with (2) hall effect sensors to get you started.
• When you recieve your order, go to the OpenSprints wiki, and read about Hardware Installation. Take special note of the instructions on a simple rework for the sensor boards that corrects a design error and enables an intended feature. http://www.opensprints.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Installation
• Please post any questions, comments, suggestions, help requests or successful hackery to the OpenSprints forum. http://www.opensprints.com/forum/
• The other parts you will need to set up your OpenSprints rig are listed on this page: http://www.opensprints.com/wiki/index.php?title=Parts_List

Ok the printed circuit board (PCB) order will be happening shortly. I'll be sending this message to (hopefully) everyone who has asked me for a set but maybe you will see it here first:

If you want your set just paypal $50 per set to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it We have ordered extra boards, so you can get some even if you weren't part of the original order.

Please include a shipping address with your paypal message!

OpenSprints Kits contain:

1x Main Board

4x Sensor Boards

Well, another year of Iro Sprints at the Sadie Hawkins day race and style ride in Chicago is finished. The party crowd was slightly smaller this year but the sprint competition was quite fierce.

When all was said and done, only one technical restart occurred and the top male and female also happened to have the fastest times of the entire night. Congratulations to Hannah and Brandon for their impressive victories, and condolences to Hailey and Josh, who each narrowly lost a set of Milwaukee Bicycle hubs.

Check out Sam's Picasa for a few awesome photos. I'll post more links to photos of the event as people get around to uploading them.

As for upcoming Iro Sprints events, the December series is gonna be something else.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3183/3013696116_503edb8cf5.jpg

Post the fastest time, male and female, of the entire series and you will win the series. There will be nightly prizes and tournaments but you do not have to come to all three nights to win.  Any profits will go to The BMEF.

The Boston Opensprints crew is breaking out the rollers in time for winter. If you are in the boston area, check it out:

read their blog!!

We've been making some changes to Opensprints lately:

• We've designed Circuit Board which cuts down a LOT on soldering and
  uses plain old ethernet cable to connect the sensors to the interface
  board:
• We've switched from the UBW to the Arduino which means that it is
  much simpler to extend the software and much easier to find Electrical
  Engineers who are familiar with the processor we use.
• We've switched from Cairo to shoes which means opensprints is much
  easier to install and will mean that one day we can run on windows and
  intel OSX easily.
• Four Bikes! (if you want it)

Portland recently had a very interesting event, organized by rapha: Rapha Cross Roller Race.  Part roller racing, part pixie bikes, part obstacle course with a generous helping of beer. Here are some pictures of the fun:

Photos via  Brujo)))  via trackosaurus REX

The OpenSprints crew in New Orleans, LA, "NOLA Bike Race" is throwing a halloween zombiecat race! There will be goldsprints at the afterparty. Here are the details:

zombiecat bicycle race

friday
october 31st, 2008

jackson square

register @ 6pm

race @ 7pm

afterparty, contests, prizes, goldsprints

$5 to race

$3 for zombies

 

Looks like NYC OpenSprints had a successful night of racing. Here is a video!

 Tomorrow night opensprints are going down in Chicago, IL. The address is at a private residence so you have to RSVP to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to know where it is!

This is my first time using the newly designed and fabricated Printed Circuit Boards. I am pumped!

I just stumbled across some photos of the battery powered  OpenSprints being used at the Bike Film Festival back in August. It was a great time, and it was great to be able to run a race outside in full daylight at a block party. Bike film festival 2008 was great, I can't wait for next year.

Photo thanks to Joel.

We got a 6 device test run of the Printed Circuit Boards. They are beautiful and work great. I'll post some pictures of them when I assemble my next setup. But here are pictures of the CADs that got sent off to be etched:

If you are in the new york area and want to see these brand new boards in action, go check out Squid, Carlos, marc and company at the I-Cycle Throwdown:

The NOLA Racing team has put together an Open Sprints rig! I am pretty happy for them. They have had one event already and they are doing another real soon:

If you are close to New Orleans, I suggest you check it out. Here are some pictures from their last event:

Luke has been busy designing new sensor boards for OpenSprints. Here is a sneak peek:

We should have the real thing before too long.