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[Rogerdodger]

Could "Copenhagen Wheel" reinvent the urban commute?
At his Cambridge, Mass., workshop, Assaf Biderman is reinventing the wheel.
"You start pedaling. The wheel understands how you pedal and then it helps you," he explained. "It just pushes you, multiplying your power up to 10 times."
It works like this: replace a regular bike wheel with a Copenhagen Wheel. The bike now works like an electric-hybrid car. A tiny computer tells the motor when to kick in. Plug the wheel into the wall to recharge it -- or just ride.
"If you're going downhill, it actually brakes you automatically and stores your energy in the battery," Biderman said. "If you're going uphill, it gives you an extra push."
The wheel can go as far as 30 miles at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. Biderman wouldn't show CBS News the inner workings, fearful of copycats.
The Copenhagen Wheel official product release VIDEO


I can just see these on pedicabs:

Edited by Rogerdodger, 14 October 2014 - 08:41 AM.

[Rogerdodger]

$40 computer!!!
The new Raspberry Pi 2



The secret sauce that makes this computer so small and powerful is the Broadcom BCM2836, an ARMv7 Quad Core Processor System-on-Chip, running at 900MHz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode and is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute. What’s that all mean? It means that if you plug the Raspberry Pi 2 into your HDTV, you could watch BluRay quality video, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.