Speedo mockup

One of the things I’ve never really liked about my XJ (check out the red/white ones) is the gauge cluster. Like a lot of bikes built in the 80s, it’s huge! It’s like a black, plastic lunch box bolted between the handle bars. With the stock bars and bikini fairing, you can’t really see it, but I’ve got the fairing off and short bars. In fact, I’m toying with the idea of switching to the set of clubman bars I’ve got gathering garage dust. The long an the short of it: I need to replace or rebuild that lunch box! With the bike off the roads for bit, now is as good a time as any. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I'll be rounding off that left corner

The “tab” on the right will house the various indicatiors. I’m planning on adding either all 5 (2 directionals, oil, neutral, brights) of just 3 and leaving the directional indicators off. Either way, I’m planning on using some round, low-profile, 12v incandescent dashboard lamps. I’ve got some 20 gague steel that should work for this and be thin enough to allow me to use the handle bar clamps to hold it on (hence the 2-holed mounting setup).  The whole thing will sit reasonably flat, and even with the clubman bars on it should look good.

I’ve got  a whole assymetrical thing going with this bike (stemming from the offcenter gass cap, really) and I’m digging how this layout fits with the rest.

the Mousebot…

Saturday was a good day. The Boy and I spent a couple of hours hanging out, working on the mousebot, then spent a bit more time experimenting with it. It’s pretty slick… We started testing ol’ Herbie out around 4:00p right in the basement offfice.

Now, one of the coolest features of this project is the light-seeking. This little guy will actually seek out the brightest light in the area. It does this by decreasing power to (and slowing) the wheel on either side based on the amount of light absorbed. The more light, the slower the wheel will turn. Befor we realized this, we figured that a dark room and a flashlight would be the best way to test the light tracking. What this really did was cause the thing to run both drive motors at top speed, sending him roaring directly into the baseboard at something like 200 mph.

This initial impact caused the bump sensor on the tail to wobble, causing the bot to race backward for one second before switching back into forward mode… 200mph into the wall. That was some funny shit!

Once we caught the thing and brought it up into the full light of day, it performed quite well. At one point we let it go racing across a narrow patch of light olny to see it overshoot, whip around 180 degrees (right) head back to the light and turn 90 degrees (left) to follow perfectly the edge of the light. I was really surprised at how well it did with only a few simple parts. Seriously, if you take out the reverse functionality, there are only ~5 parts.