Nokia Bicycle Charger

3 volt dynamo

In a recent post about the mobile phone revolution in Africa I wrote that the Nokia Bicycle Charger was the first item on my shopping list. Well last week I got one and fitted it to my brand new Raleigh Royal Touring Bike (review coming soon).

In the box is a 3 volt bottle dynamo, a Nokia DC14 charger, a rubber phone holder, instructions and some cable ties. The charger is fitted with a Nokia 2mm adaptor. The instructions are clear and well illustrated and it took about five minutes to fit. My mobile phone is an aging Nokia 2730, it was half charged when I set off cycling and after a little less than two hours of relaxed cycling (9 to 10 mph) it was fully charged.

I tested the charger for resistance by cycling a 3.41 mile course, on a fully loaded touring bike, over gently rolling terrain, once with the charger working and once without. It took 21 minute and 18 second with the charger on, and 20 minutes and 10 seconds with the charger off. It takes a little more more energy to run the charger but only a little. As a child I cycled old style roadsters with bottle dynamos powering incandescent lights and they produced a lot more resistance.

I tried the charger with a Blackberry and a Samsung Smartphone (with a micro USB adapter), but it did not work with either. I found an interesting post at toddlerontour.com about how to convert it to charge android phones by replacing the 2mm adaptor with a USB port, taken from the end of a USB extension cable. According to this post the charger will then work with most electronic devices that can be charged from a USB port. Although not with IPhones.

Phone straps to handlebars

I’m confident the charger will last. The only moving part is the dynamo and this is a very old and reliable technology. The rubber phone holder which straps the phone and charger to the handlebars, may not last but I have a handlebar bag on my touring bike and the phone and charger can be just as easily carried in that as strapped to the handlebars.

Last year I bought the Freeloader Classic and Freeloader Supercharger, a solar powered phone charging system. It cost three times more than the Nokia charger. Under optimum sunny conditions, which are very rare in Ireland, the Freeloader system will produce a trickle of power. For one third the price the Nokia charger will produce a lot more power and it is not dependent on the vagaries of the Irish weather.

The typical cost of an electric hookup on an Irish campsite is 3 or 4 Euros. When camping wild there is no electric hookup available. The Nokia charger is a simple, elegant, reliable and cost effective way to keep your Nokia phone charged when far from home on your bicycle.

I got mine for 30 Euros from Phonesoline.ie

The Bicycle Charger on the Nokia Website

My pride and joy, my new Raleigh Royal touring bike

Wild Food - The Stinging Nettle

To my Irish peasant ancestors the worst time of year was April and May, the hungry gap. Last years crops and food stores were close to running out and they were still waiting for the first harvest of early potatoes in June. The great standby food crop in this lean time of year was the stinging nettle, Urtica dioica.

The traditional Irish balled the Town of Ballybay has a verse
She had children up the stairs, she had children in the byre
And another ten or twelve sittin' rottin' by the fire.
She fed 'em on potatoes, and soup she made with nettles,
And lumps of hairy bacon that she boiled up in the kettle.

Nettles are a perennial flowering plant, a native of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America. Anyone who has ever been stung by it will know it well. It is a persistent and tough weed, difficult to control in the garden.

Nettles are rich in vitamins A, C, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium. Traditionally in Ireland the growing tips were harvested at this time of year and used with potatoes and leeks (another great hungry gap crop) to make soup. Old people swore by its properties as a spring tonic. It was also used extensively in herbal medicine. The leaves when soaked in water make an excellent liquid fertiliser for the kitchen garden.

The website Edible Ireland has an excellent recipe for traditional Irish nettle soup

According to Wikipedia while the plant is widely distributed in North America it is not quite as common as it is in Europe. If any North American readers are in an area where the plant is not common and wish to propagate it as a food crop, it will sprout freely from any sliver of root. It will not however grow well in very dry soil.

The Stinging Nettle in Wikipedia.

The African Mobile Phone Revolution

I recently came across the Nokia Bicycle Charger, designed to charge mobile phones with a bottle dynamo. It is an intriguing hybrid of old technology, the bicycle dynamo, which was very common when I was a child and new technology the mobile phone. 

Nokia developed it for the African market. Much of Africa has a very poor infrastructure, with poor electric and landline phone systems. This has lead it to leapfrog landline phone services and embrace mobile phone ownership. Half of all Africans now own a mobile phone. In a continent where many areas have very poor access to mains electricity a bicycle charger is a very elegant and simple solution to the problem of charging phones. 

Africa is pioneering new services that may soon spread to the rest of the world. Electronic money on mobiles is catching on very quickly, new text services are developing, mobiles are being used to create networks to monitor elections and hold public officials to account. 

Like the bicycle charger the African revolution is an intriguing hybrid, where an underdeveloped and apparently backward continent is leading the world in innovative and efficient communication services and ideas. In Africa necessity is proving to be the mother of invention.  
  
Even with its underdeveloped infrastructure and chronic poverty Africa can maintain a mobile phone infrastructure and become world leader in mobile services. Perhaps in future decades as western societies power down we will be able to maintain our mobile phone systems. 

Necessity will certainly force us to loose many resource hungry technologies like the car as a system of mass transit. But there are some advanced technologies that consume modest amounts of resources and have great utilitarian value. In the future we will, all other things being equal, continue to maintain these technologies. I believe and hope that mobile phone communications will be one of those technologies. 

The Nokia Bicycle Charger is now the number one item on my shopping list. When I head off bicycle touring this summer my bike will be equipped with a Nokia smartphone and a charger. On the road I will keep in touch with home, watch the weather forecast, find information about the areas I am passing through and maybe post on this blog, all from the saddle of my touring bike. This service will cost me one euro a day. 

The future is here already and it’s a hybrid of old technologies like the bicycle and the bottle dynamo and new technologies like the smart phone. 

A good Guardian article on the African phone revolution 

BBC article on same

The Nokia Bicycle Charger


Available from Phonesonline.ie for 30 euros

Maps for Irish Cycle Touring

With the days getting longer and the weather getting warmer I have begun to think about the 2012 bicycle touring season. I've only ever cycle toured in Ireland and will do so again this year. I always plan tours and try to avoid busy main roads and very hilly routes. In the old days I would plan with paper maps, but now I use the Internet.

Inis More on the OS Website

The main website for this is Ordinance Survey Ireland (OS), which has all essential mapping information for the whole island. On the homepage click on the link “Explore Maps Using Our Free Viewer”. Then zoom in on the map of Ireland until the scale is 1:100000. At this scale the map shows every back road and lane. I screen grab the maps I want, load them into a graphics editor, crop them and print them out on A4 sheets. These print outs are the maps I take with me on the road, an A4 sheet is very convenient to work with on a windy day.

Ordinance Survey produce a set of 1:50,000 scale maps, which are sold in many Irish shops and online. They are superb maps for planning a cycle tour, but they are printed on big sheets and are not convenient to use on the road. They are also expensive selling at euro 8.25 on the OS website and there are over 100 sheets to cover the whole island. On a long tour the price and the weight of a large collection of these maps make them unsuitable for cycling. The OS also sell a 1:250000 scale map which covers the island with four sheets. Again they are unwieldy to use on the road and they do not show the very small back roads.

Inis More on Mapmyride

The main problem with the online OS maps is that they do not show elevations so I overcome this shortcoming with the website Mapmyride. I plot my potential route on their website and click on the elevation button to get data on elevations and gradients. Mapmyride also gives the distance of the route plotted. You must register to use it.

Another website I use is Google maps with Street View. Occasionally there is no convenient option but to use a busy main road. When this is the case I use Google street view to see how wide the road is and if it has a hard shoulder.

The Dingle Tralee road on Google Street View

Cycling in an Oil Crisis

I was reminded of the 1973 Oil Crisis last week when I came across an online article about a sudden spike in the sale of hybrid bikes in the UK. Evans Cycles one of the biggest online bike sellers in the UK reported a 57% increase in the sales of hybrids, that coincided with the fuel panic. Now this could have been due to the unseasonable summer like weather experienced all over the British Isles, or it could have been caused by the fuel panic.

Cycling on the German Autobahn November 1973

I suspect the fuel panic was the cause as we had equally brilliant summer like weather here in Ireland but I can find no reference to a similar surge in bike sales. It reminded me of the 1973 Oil Crisis when my father who worked about four miles from home bought a bike and started cycling to work. I suppose I remember this so well because it was the first time I had ever seen him on a bike.

Buying a bike is a creative and practical way to respond to a fuel crisis. It does not add to the panic, it helps to ease the demand for fuel and it allows life to proceed normally. The problem is that in a fuel crisis many motorists do not act in a practical way, they often act in ways that add to the crisis. They hoard fuel, they sit in their cars wasting fuel as they queue at filling stations and they waste fuel driving around looking for fuel.

Cycling becomes much safer in a fuel crisis. There are less cars on the roads, all unnecessary car journeys stop and drivers are moving much slower to conserve fuel. The next Oil Crisis will create all kinds of a problems but as a cyclist I can say I look forward to the safer cycling conditions it will produce.

Queuing for fuel 1973

Touring Toolkit

One of the great advantages of bicycle travel over car travel is that all the working parts are exposed (with the exception of hub gears) and any roadside problem is easily diagnosed. A cyclist with a little mechanical knowledge and a few basic tools can fix most problems at the side of the road. A basic emergency toolkit will cover every breakdown apart from total failure of the frame or a wheel.

The basis of a lightweight toolkit is a good multitool. Mine (see photo) includes a set of spanners, allen keys and screwdrivers. Add a puncture repair kit and three tyre levers and you have the essential emergency toolkit.

A chain breaker will repair a broken chain and a spoke key can be used to take a bad buckle out of a wheel with a broken spoke. In both cases these roadside repairs maybe enough to get you home or to the nearest bikeshop,where proper repairs can be done.

Wire is invaluable for binding anything that breaks or is hanging loose. It can be used to bind loose part until you get home or to a bikeshop and do proper repairs. Duct tape will do the same job.

I always carry a spare tube, it’s easier to change a punctured tube at the side of the road and repair it at home. A fantastic modern innovation is the folding tyre, which can carried in a bag and will cover you against the danger of a tyre blowing out on the road.

All the essentials are available from Chain Reaction Cycles

Park Tool Rescue Tool MTB 3 €30.98

Puncture Repair Kit €2.47

Park Tool Compact Chain Tool €16.10

Spoke Key €4.94