Synth Bike 3.0 Postmortem and Revival

When we featured musical maker Sam Battle’s Synth Bike way back in 2016, it stood at version 2.0, and featured all kinds of electronics packed into a rideable chassis. Fast forward to June 2017, and Synth Bike 3.0 arrived on the scene, trading in rideability — tethered to a stationary trainer — for a much better user interface.

The system, which features 12 Arduino Nanos and a SparkFun WAV trigger, spent the first six-to-eight months of its life inside Dublin’s Science Gallery. During this time, it was ridden by approximately 130,000 people. If you didn’t get a chance to hop on the SB3.0, you may have another shot it will be “going out on the road again.” In his latest video, Battle opens up the bike’s controller to see what’s inside as a sort of electronic time capsule.

Battle, clad here in a fireman’s uniform, could be entertaining in any scenario, but it’s interesting to watch him give a sort of postmortem on the device to see what still works and what doesn’t. The good news is that besides a wire or two being disconnected, and a few Arduinos that were somehow missing, the console was in good shape.

As with anyone that’s constantly refining his hacking skills, Battle notes that he would have likely done a few things differently today, but by the end manages to get things running quite well. The video concludes with a quick electro-bike musical performance, with a helmet and face shield protecting him from any dangerous beats.