The Trip

It’s been ages since I’ve posted an update! The trip is only two and a half weeks away, and while there is plenty still to be done, there’s plenty more that is falling into place.

Tank Bag Insert
I’ve been working on a foam insert for the tank bag, to keep everything in there in its place. At this point it has to house (securely):

• UHF Handheld CB Radio (and cradle… not ideal)
• VIO-POV helmet camera recorder unit
• AutoCom comms integrator
• Canon HV-20 HDV Camera
• Battery charger for the above video camera
• iPod nano
• Mobile phone
• 2 x 3-way cigarette lighter sockets
• Power adapters for the radio, the helmet camera, the battery charger, the mobile phone, the iPod and the AutoCom
• A pair of gloves

The VIO-POV and the UHF radio barely fit upright in the deepest part of the bag, and the mass of cables and adapters is pretty frightening. Mk I turned out to be to bulky, and trying to shape the layers of foam to compensate for the angled floor of the bag became tricky. Mk II has worked out much better. The foam is angled with the floor of the bag, and the whole insert stops a few inches from the front (handle-bar end) of the bag, leaving space for the jumbled cables and adapters. I think it will work!

Testing… one… two…
Had an interesting weekend of testing recently.

First of all, I’ve worked out that I’ve hooked up the SAE connector to the bike with reverse polarity. It doesn’t matter too much, since the cigarette lighter sockets I’ve rigged up are also wired in reverse to compensate. So, unless I want to hook something directly to an SAE connector, I should be OK… except that in its current state the SAE connector can short against the frame of the bike, which is not so good.

I’m reluctant, but I think I’ll need to fix that.

Ran some tests with the AutoCom the iPod and the VIO-POV, all running off the bike. The first issue was the electrical noise from the bike. I’ll have to add a noise filter to the power supply, which suddenly makes fixing the crossed polarity less of an issue, since I’ll be pulling things apart anyway. The noise wasn’t so bad with just the iPod, but when I spoke and the VOX system kicked in, it was much worse. I’ve sourced a filter… so that will have to be added.

The next thing I found was that the throat mic was freaking out the AutoCom somehow. I’d experienced this already in tests at home, but it’s worse than I thought. I’m not sure yet if it’s just the adapter I’ve made, or if the gain on the mic is a little high, but either way, it creates an awful hiss in the headphones which masks just about everything else.

I’ve got the VIO-POV recorder connected to one of the AUX ports on the AutoCom. It doesn’t pick up the sound from the iPod (and I don’t know yet if it picks up other parties in CB an phone conversations), but it picks up anything from my own mic, or that of a pillion passenger. What I can’t tell (with the electrical noise and the hiss) is whether it records all the time, or just when the VOX control kicks in. The clips I made have engine/power noise right through, and I can’t hear the mic kick in and out the way I do in my earphones… so that will need further testing when the power noise issue is sorted.

The VOX sensitivity will need to be adjusted, too (if that’s possible). At the moment I need to talk fairly loudly to get it to kick in. It’s not too bad, but if I trail off at the end of a sentence, the gate closes and the last few words are lost. Again, it might be related to the position of the throat mic, and a range of other things.

New Gear
I’ve got a bit of gear on order (some of it on back-order, which could get tricky), and have purchased some other items:

• Dianese Knee Pads – they’re slim enough to sit inside the top of my dirt-bike boots, and they have articulated knees
• Pivot Pegz – these things better be the best you can buy, cause they’re flipping expensive. Pretty though. Will fit them in the next few days.
• Fox padded bike shorts – these have a padded seat like normal bike shorts, but have added protection for the hips and coccyx. My girlfriend the paramedic tells me that nursing home patients wear them to protect their hips if they fall… though without the “Fox” branding, I suspect.
• RAM Mounts – a handful of balls and clamps so that I can mount my helmet camera just about anywhere. They’re ordered… should be here any day
• AutoComm cables – an adapter for the UHF radio, plus a PTT switch for Marco. The switch is on back-order, but should be here by the end of the week.

More news to come… I’m going to bed.

I’ve done a bit of work with the AutoCom Active PLUS, to make it work with my setup. I’ve added a cigarette lighter plug to the 12v power lead so that I can run it from one of the outlets in the tank bag. I’ve also cut the push-to-talk lead where it goes to the PTT button, and added in a 3.5mm jack, so that I can have the adapter in the tank bag, but leave the PTT button on the handlebars, and disconnect and reconnect things fairly quickly.

Last weekend’s job was to make my Earmolds and thoat mic work with the Autocom. The supplied setup puts speakers and a mic inside the helmet. Since I’m determined to use the Earmolds, that would leave me with a mic in the helmet and speakers (or earphones) on my body, meaning I’d have to unplug something every time I removed my helmet.

I’ve had a throat mic for years, which I bought for another trip, but never really used. The lead is designed to accommodate mono speakers or earphones (which I don’t want to use) so I’ve wired up only the mic pins of the lead. If you’re interested, the throat mic is a Noise Terminator GP, which has since been superseded. I suspect that most mics of this sort are from a common source, and rebranded… but I can’t prove that.

The Autocom kit came with a couple of extension leads for the rider and pillion, so I’ve modified one of these to make the adapter. After confirming that the pin-outs listed here are correct, I’ve wired a 3.5mm stereo jack and a 2.5mm mono jack to one end the lead, and heat-shrunk everything.

The result seems to be OK so far… not that I’ve been on the bike with it yet. But with everything connected I can hear music and hear myself quite well. I also connected the VIO-POV camera to the whole setup, and the Autocom channels my voice (all the time, without music, to the exclusion of the inbuilt mic) to the camera footage, which is perfect!

All I’m missing now is a UHF radio and the adapter to connect it to the AutoCom. Fellow traveller Marco recently bought a GME TX680 for his, though I don’t think he’s tested it as part of the rig yet.

Apart from that, I just need to organise the contents of the bag so all of the wires are out of the way, and the items I need to access are within easy reach. If, after all that, I can fit a video camera and a pair of gloves in there, I’ll be pretty happy!

I’ve previously posted about the VIO POV helmet camera system. Since then, the new POV 1.5 camera has been released. It sports a wider-angle lense, and a new camera assembly that has the lead permanently attached. VIO has also released a POV 1.5 MOTO kit, suited to motosport applications. It includes a vehicle wiring harness and replacement cover for the battery compartment which has power input and a tripod mount for the recorder.

A friend was able to pick one of these up for me on a recent trip to New York, which saved me a few hundred dollars off the local price.

The updated kit is very good, with new accessories and mounting options. It comes with an innovative helmet mount which can be affixed by Velcro, double-sided tape, or magnets. The magnet option works with a second plate which you can place on the inside of a hat, to allow the camera to attach.

Probably the only disappointing change is the lack of a tripod mount for the camera itself. One of the clamps in the old kit included a tripod thread… the new one doesn’t. Also the nature of the new clamp is such that changing the camera from one mounting option to another is a bit fiddly. At this point I plan to work out a RAM Mount solution for the camera head which will stay in place, and use RAM’s own mounts from there to quickly move the camera around.

I’ve take a few test runs, with the camera on the roof of the car, and with it attached to various points on the bike. I’m really happy with the results – except for the point where the card died with 2 hours of footage on it. I’ve replaced the card… and so far so good, but no real footage to show just yet. What I can say is that the crash bars probably vibrate a little too much to attach the camera to, but that the handlebars work a treat. The wide-angle lense means I can point the camera back at myself while riding and get me and the background in the shot.

The wireless remote is great. I was able to tag shots easily while riding. I’m not sure yet where I’ll mount the remote, but at the moment it’s been Velcro’d to the top of the tank bag, and that seems to be working OK.

I’ve also been playing with the tagging system, with it set to a 5 minute loop interval. It appears that the camera doesn’t start a new loop when you press the tag button, but starts a new loop every 5 minutes regardless. If you press the tag button 1 minute into a loop (for instance) it will retain the current loop and the one before it, so as to retain the last 5 minutes (or more) of footage. It’s not as accurate as “save the last 5 minutes please”, but it does ensure the footage you want is retained, and that’s what matters. Any loop that doesn’t have a tag within it, or within the loop immediately after, is disacarded automatically.

I’ll post some footage as soon as I have some.

Managed to get some great work done on the bike over the weekend. A few weeks ago I ordered the Wolfman Large Expedition tank bag (in black), ProiTaper ATV Hi handlebars and a bunch of cables and connectors. They finally came, so I worked out what smaller bits I would need, bought those, and got to work.

Pro-Taper SE ATV Hi Bars
I took a couple of phone-photos of the OEM bars in their current position in case I needed to compare them later, but in the end it was the front fairing and the dashboard that decided the angle of the bars. I’ve been holding off on buying a riser kit, but I think I’ll get one now. The new bars are almost the same bend as the stockers, which means they’re just a little too low when I’m standing up.

SAE Power Connector

Amongst the gear that I’d ordered (and waited some time for) from BlueRim were a couple of fused SAE wiring harnesses. I decided to go for these instead of a dashboard or handlebar-mounted Powerlet socket, since a mounted socket would require a connecting lead, which is both more expense and something else to go wrong down the track.

The cable I’d purchased was long enough to reach from the battery to the tank bag, but I ended up deviating from my original plan and adding in a relay, so that the tank bag would turn on and off with the ignition switch. By the time I’d run the cable from the battery to the dashboard (where I’d mounted the relay and sourced the switched power) to the tank bag, it was all too short. Since I had to cut the cable to add the relay anyway, I spliced in some extra cable, and it worked out pretty well.

I sourced the main power from the main fuse under the seat, just near the generator. This is the same as taking power straight from the + terminal on the battery, but the location is better. The switched power from the relay came off one of the dashboard backlights (which, it turned out, had a blown bulb).

I routed the connector itself up through the handlebars and used the tether on the end-cap to keep it in place. It seems to work pretty well there, and the cable is stiff enough that it isn’t going to move.

Powering the Tank Bag
Another item I sourced from BlueRim was a waterproof power connector for the tank bag. The external socket is made from hard

rubber, and there’s a metal plate inside the bag that clamps the whole thing in place. On the inside I added a double adapter, so I now have 2 SAE connectors inside the bag. All-up, it came out looking pretty sweet.

Gadgets
I removed the cigarette lighter plug from the end of a 3-way lighter-socket powerboard, and replaced it with an SAE connector, and hooked that up to the inside plug on the bag. I also fitted a cigarette lighter plug on the AutoCom, and connected that to the power outlet, along with my Belkin iPod car charger. I connected the iPod and my mobile phone to the AutoCom, conntected the whole thing to the bike, and tested it. Apart from the mic not registering on the phone, the whole thing worked quite nicely. The AutoCom fades the music when you speak, and it really does cancel out background noise and wind (well, all I did was blow in the microphone, but it seems to work).

More to follow on the push-to-talk switch and other tank-bag gadgets… but it’s coming together.

My new Autcom Active-PLUS arrived the other day. The unit looks much the same as the photos, though I was surprised to see that the connections for rider, pillion and UHF radio are all full-sized DIN plugs. I’d guessed that they’d be mini-DIN plugs – much like a mouse or keyboard plug – since that’s what I’d had on my old Aldi helmet radio system.

Not that it matters. I might just need to rethink how the cables come out of the tank bag, since I don’t think the access ports I was looking at would be large enough.

The leads from the main unit are reasonably long (though the pillion lead is shorter than the rider’s, so I guess they’re expecting it to be mounted at the back of the bike) so I won’t need both the supplied extension leads. I’ll sacrifice one of these and get it turned into an adapter for my throat mic and earmolds. I’ve managed to find an image of the pin-outs for the rider/pillion leads, and for the UHF lead.

So, here’s what I’m thinking regarding the tank bag and GPS:

Heavy Duty SAE Power Lead
This will run from the battery to the front of the bike. I was originally planning to terminate the power supply at a nice Powerlet socket with a lit, but looking at the cost, the effort of drilling the dash area etc, I’ve decided that an SAE connector with a rubber cap, clipped up under the fairing, will do the job. I can also tailor the length of lead I have available so it exactly reaches the bag. It can be clipped out of the way when not in use.

PowerMate Bulkhead Kit
This is an access port through the material of the tank bag. It’s basically an SAE connector on both sides, with a plastic sandwich plate to hold it all in place. I’ll add a second one of these for the PTT switch, which I’ll get to in a moment.

SAE Splitter
Inside the bag, I want to power 2 banks of cigarette lighter sockets. At this point I have 6 devices inside the bag that need to be powered, so 2 banks of 3 or 4 sockets will do the trick. Anyway, each of these will connect back to the power supply via an SAE plug.

Handlebar Push To Talk (PTT) Switch
As reluctant as I am to spend money on what is essentially a push-button, I think in the end I’ll have to. I’ll chop the switch lead from the rest of the harness and add in some SAE connectors, so that I can remove the tank bag and leave the PTT switch behind. I’ll need to decide whether I buy a separate adapter cable for the UHF radio I choose, or just remove the plug from the end of the harness and put the right connectors on the end. Since it’s all in the tank bag, it won’t need to be waterproof, or particularly long.

The rider and pillion leads will just go out the top of the bag, I think… the plugs are too large to use access ports.

Wow… it’s a bit sad when my twitter feed is generating more blog posts than I am. Need to remedy that.

Last week I ordered an Autocom Active PLUS from a reseller on eBay. It pays to shop around for these, since the one I bought got undercut by another reseller a few ours before I purchased, and I missed it. Also, by the looks of Autocom’s UK site, they’re replacing their entire model range, so there’s a good chance that all the existing models will start to drop in price in the next few months.

Anyway, I’ll soon be kitted up for iPod, phone, UHF radio and GPS chatter in my ears. I’ll need to get a an adapter made up for my Earmolds and my Noise Terminator throat mic, but that shouldn’t be too hard. In the meantime, the kit comes with two complete helmet setups, so I can at least test it with one of those.

At this point I’m still leaning toward a tank bag as the means of housing the Autocomm and all the associated gadgets. The Wolfman Expedition is probably winning – I’ll wedge all the power adapters etc in the bottom corner of it, and put a false floor over that. I’ll need to feed lines out for power, GPS and the PTT switch at the front, and for the mic/headphone jack at the back. Should be a nice setup when it’s done.

I’ve also ordered a bash plate from JNS Engineering in the states. I was able to share the postage with a couple of other guys… pretty happy about that.

I’ve done a bit of snooping today, looking at the parts used in the Earmolds earphones I bought yesterday.

Seems that the earphones themselves are made by McKay Associates, an Australian company that sells radio accessories around the world. The best (actually the ONLY) price I’ve been able to find for the earphones themselves is around $AUD100, which is $AUD50 less than what Earmold is selling them for.

McKay seem to have some great comms gear. They don’t sell radios, but specialise in  accessories – and seem to do so very well.

So add to that a DIY earplug kit for around $AUD50 and you have pretty much the same setup for $70 less than the Earmolds offering. Of course, if it doesn’t work, the risk is on you. Perhaps the middle-ground is to buy the McKay earphones and get an audiologist to make the earplugs.

But perhaps after all that, $220 to get Earmolds to do it isn’t so bad.

When I went to the MotoGP at Phillip Island last year I checked out the custom molded silicone ear plugs from Earmold. These guys had a stand at the expo there, and were making money hand over fist making plugs and earphones for riders. I was a little reluctant to put money down on something that you really can’t test first. You really don’t know how they will work until they make a set for your ears.

While I was at the Superbikes yesterday, I took the plunge and bought a set of earphone plugs. They’re flipping expensive, and I’m guessing their costs area fraction of the sale price, but since I haven’t been able to find an alternative or do-it-yourself solution that I could guarantee would work, I decided to go with these.

The earphones work on a rubber-hose system, which puts the actual speaker about 30cm away from your head, and funnels the sound through the tube, which runs through the earpiece. (This is the part I haven’t been able to source elsewhere…). The noise supression is good, though I’m told not quite as good as the solid plugs. There’s also a little bit of wind noise from the tubes themselves at speed. Sound quality is good, though probably not worthy of the title “most expensive earphones I’ve ever bought.” That said, at speed they’re the best sound I’ve heard in my helmet… and that’s what counts.

They come in a range of awful colours, but I got mine made in skin-tone, so I can wear thm as in-ear monitors on stage if that opportunity ever presents itself again. Unfortunately Earmolds no longer use clear tubing, so even with skin-tone plugs I have black leads running from my ears.

That little bit of wind noise aside, the ride home was very good!

Seems that the new aluminium bash plate I spotted back in December has gone into production. The finished product looks great, with good protection for the drain plug, countersunk bolts on the bottom, and great coverage on the front.

UPDATE: I’ve received word from jnsengineering that the cost to ship to Australia is $45 for one, and $50 for two or three. Anyone around Melbourne interested in sharing the shipping costs, let me know via the comments.

This week I took delivery of a new video camera. My old one didn’t quite come back in one piece from a trip earlier in the year, and I’ve been trying to decide whether to buy a replacement standard def DV model (the equivalent replacement being around $300), or to get on the HD bandwagon. I figured that if I got a lower-end camera I’d still end up buying something HD before long, so it was more a matter of which one when.

I’ve been looking at the Canon HV20 for some time. It one some awards when it came out in 2007, and has reviewed very well. It’s also been the starting point (albeit with some pretty funky add-ons) for some indie filmmakers. It’s reasonably compact, and it’s HDV – using the same miniDV tapes that my old camera used. I’ve never taken to the idea of a HDD-based camera, especially since full is full, and when you’re in the middle of nowhere you can’t do much about it. Also the compression of AVCHD cameras makes the footage a pain to edit. So, the HV20 ticked all the boxes for me.

The HV20 was replaced by the HV30 not long ago. It’s effectively the same camera, painted black. The only new feature is a 24fps “cine mode”, which further caters to the indie film guys. In the US where normal frame rates are 30fps (well, technically 60, but that doesn’t matter), it’s a great feature. In Australia, where standard frame rates are 25fps, the feature is almost useless… which is why the Australian HV30 doesn’t even have the cine mode feature.

So… there are stockists in Australia with HV20s imported when the dollar was, you know, worth around a dollar, who also have the newer but virtually identical HV30, which they no doubt imported at a considerably poorer exchange rate. The difference in price? between $200 and $500, depending on where you look.

I’ve taken a few shots with it, and the quality is incredible. I’ve been looking at 35mm DOF adapters (more on that in a moment) but to be honest the depth of field and manual focus on the camera itself is very good, to the point where I’d have a hard time justifying the expense of an add-on lens.

35mm Depth of Field adapters are a great idea. The theory is that video will never have the cinematic properties of film, as long as the capture surface is smaller than the 35mm stock of motion picture film; so to get around this, a variety of manufacturers have developed a “light-box” with a piece of ground glass inside acting as a two-way screen, that sits between a a conventional 35mm SLR lens and a consumer or prosumer DV camera. The 35mm lens projects onto the ground glass an image with all the qualities of 35mm footage, while all the Dv camera has to do is hold focus on the other side of the ground glass. Some of the results are incredible. If you don’t believe me, Google it and take a look.

Most of these adapters start around the $US1000 mark, and go up from there. 35mm lenses project an upside down image, so you wind up recording the image that way, or running your camera upside down. Either way, the image in the viewfinder remains upside down, regardless of which way up your camera is. So some developers have added an image-correcting feature to their 35mm adapters… for a price.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover http://www.handy35.com, a small company in Turkey which is producing (by all reports) a very good 35mm adapter for around half the price of most others. The design is smart, and aimed squarely at smaller cameras. It spins the ground glass (where others sometimes vibrate it) so that the grain of the glass can never be captured by the camera, only the image projected on it. It doesn’t rotate the image, but that’s not a show stopper, particularly at the price.

So now I’ve found the adapter I would buy if I were to buy one, and have a camera that makes me wonder if I would really ever need it.