My Morning Diet Coke on the Trike

Video from this weekend!

Here is my first attempt at posting video on my Blog. This is a one minute downhill run on the Provo River Parkway. It was recorded using the AV500 and uses the DivX codec, so you'll need that installed on your system to play it.

Final Camera Mount

Here is a picture of the latest and best-so-far camera mounting arrangement for the front of the trike. You can see the camera is mounted in a rubber microphone clip (MY100) which is attached to the support shaft. I also tightened up the accessory bar which is connected to the blue frame (derailer post) and that made a lot of difference. I run the camera's cable down the front of the frame and along the bottom and then connect it to the AV500 in front of the seat. The little length of cable between the camera and the coils seems to be enough to let the camera twist freely without getting tangled.

On this closeup picture you can see the bolt assembly better. The lock nuts work much better than the wingnuts did and the neoprene washers do a good job at keeping the whole assembly tight while still allowing it to twist. The basic mic clip seems to provide just the right amount of dampening without letting the camera bounce around too much.

My Trike Videos

Recording video while riding a trike and have it turn out ok depends a lot on the camera placement. The camera position determines the area that is recorded and the action's point of view. The other important aspect of recording is what is actually being recorded.

For my first test videos, I had the camera placed on the right side of my helmet with some velcro. I had the recording device (Archos AV500) in my saddlebag. This immediately presented a couple drawbacks. First, my head was now tethered to the trike, which means I have to take the helmet off before I get off the vehicle. Not doing this hurts. Second, because of the cable length from the camera to the recorder the AV500 has to get put in the bags in back. This means that once I'm rolling I can't see what's being recorded or if the unit is even still on. Despite these limitations I did make some recordings and the video did turn out. My head acts like a big shock absorber for the camera making the image pretty steady. The bad news is that, apparently, I move my head side to side quite often. Good for seeing the sights, but quite dizzying on video. This was combined with a constant view of the side of my helmet on the left of the screen. This could probably be resolved by moving the camera to the top of the helmet.

The main thing I learned from the helmet-mounted-camera test is that unless I'm riding among other riders, the video looks boring. Mounting the camera to the front would be an ideal position because then I could rotate the camera to point in different direction including at myself to break up the monotony. So, with a handlebar mount from a walmart bike headlight and some hardware from home depot I came up with the contraption to the left. The Viosport cameras have threads on them, so I screwed a bolt right into it and used a wingnut to lock against it. Having the camera placed in the front of the trike also meant I needed the AV500 in the front. I liked this idea because I could mount the unit so I could see the video live from the camera. So, I built a cradle for the AV500 out of some Aluminum and a bike bottle holder. This allowed me to mount it to the stock accessory holder. It was time for more testing.

The position of the camera in the front is much better. I can turn the camera while rolling and aim it at whatever I want. I quickly disvovered that my mount needed some work. Everytime I would rotate the camera one of the wingnuts would loosen. That meant I was constantly adjusting and then tightening. The next thing I discovered was that the vibrations of the road were too much for the AV500's hard drive. I was able to fix this by covering the bottom of my aluminum cradle with Velcro and about 25% of that amount of Velcro on the AV500's battery. The unit is now held secure but has enough dampening from the Velcro to prevent damaged video files. With that taken care of I got some good video, but the vibration made it almost unwatchable. Running the video through SteadyHand gets rid of most the vibration. SteadyHand is a software image stabilization program.

Even with SteadyHand, I thought I could get some better video if I minimized some of the vibration. My brother thought that an audio microphone shock mount might do the trick, so I remade the mount to include the AT897 shock mount and reworked my bolt arrangement to eliminate the loosening wingnuts. To lock the bolt on and still allow me to rotate the camera without loosening, I used nylon locknuts instead of the wingnuts. To keep tension on the handlebar mount I used two fender washers and two neoprene washers. With the whole assembly bolted up I put the camera camera in the shock mount. The results -- smoother but more shaking due to the camera being suspended in the mount.

My next step was to replace the AT897 mount with a basic mic clip. So far I think that's the best setup.

Next time I'll talk about the actual video and post some samples.

My First Organized Trike Ride

Russ Card from Recumbent Cycles of Utah, organizes summer events called the Bent Bike Boogie. On Saturday I got to ride with the other participants along the Provo River Parkway from the Orem parking lot to Vivian Park and back. The event is open to all the local recumbent riders, bikes and trikes alike. The only ones that showed up this time were trikers. I connected our Walmart-special bike trailer to the back and towed Hannah behind me.

It was an absolute blast. It's fun to ride the trike the trike alone, but with a group of others it's even more fun. And, out of pure coincidence, all of except for one guy were wearing red t-shirts, so it felt like we were part of a club.

The ride to Vivian Park is slightly uphill, but with towing the trailer it was enough to make it hard to keep up with the leader at times. Coming back on the downhill run was a different story. The extra weight of the trailer added some momentum and made it easy to cruise up front.

It's a great group and we already set up a date for our next ride. I told them about our ride around West Mountain, but they said they weren't quite ready for that yet.

I did get the ride on video, but I'll post details about that a little later.