Location: Sürth
Distance since last post:15km
Weather: warm but cloudy and wet.
Notes: Always wear tight underwear when cycling!

A business issue this morning cost me 25% of my battery power and with the current weather situation, cloudy and wet, that could cost me dearly. There was a brief bright period at around noon where i slammed on the breaks and stopped to put out the panel but it was short, lived. The mobile phone needs a top-up and the GPS too. It’s fair to say that this has not been the best week for solar energy but despite that, it’s been possible to get a few hours of umpc work done every day. The bad weather has also made me think long and hard about how the process can be improved. I have some notes that i am going to try to type up tonight but that, of course, depends on my battery!

Planning a busman’s holiday around the weather isn’t that easy. Camp set-up and break down, cycling between locations, working, keeping an eye on the weather, finding suitable places to work and charging power sources all need to be thought about. The key to success here (in our wonderfully changeable weather system) is to be flexible between 10:00 and 16:00 when there’s a possibility to get something out of the sun. Outside these hours there isn’t enough power in the sunlight to make it worth any effort or planning.

The original plan was to cycle during the day with the solar panel across the back of the bike however, a 25W panel is too big to lay in a useful, efficient position across the back of the bike so either I suffer with 50% energy loss or I stop when the sun shines. Having thought about it for about 2 seconds I think the latter idea is rather good and in fact, the objective of the tour is not to cycle as far as possible, its to test and learn about how UMPCs can be used and powered in mobile situations.

A rough dry-day plan could go like this.

• 0730-0830 wake up. Check email/RSS, Cuppa, Breakfast and pack up.
• 0845-1100 on the road for a concentrated 40km ride. Panel 50% deployed on bike but not expecting any usable power at this time of day.
• 1100-1600 Weather watch! If its sunny then stop and charge! Work, play, read, eat during this time. If not sunny try to get to campsite before midday in order to deploy trickle charge solution. Best charging period is 1200-1400 here.
• 1700-1900 If not already at campsite, set up tent. Find food. Shower. Food. Relax. Connect mobile phone and AA batteries for top-up from lead-acid battery.
• 1900-2100 Work (max 1.5 hours)
• 2100-2130 Prep for morning.
• 2200-2300 To bed with RSS, emails or book. Pray for sun! Earplugs in (camping by the Rhein is always noisy) and sleep…

Next job is to get the Google map started. I’m using RoboGeo to generate a live route map (here’s one I prepared earlier!) with images but I’d like to merge Google ‘My Map’  KML data with it so that I can build more than just a track map. If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know.

Update: I worked it out. You can create the My Map in Google Maps by doing the usual drag a nd drop, draw etc etc. Then export the KML. Uload the KML to your web server and add the following two red lines into your RoboGeo ‘map.htm’ file after the ‘var map’ line. Obviously you need to adjust the URL to point to the KML file you uploaded.

var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(“map”));
var geoXml = new GGeoXml(“http://www.solar-
umpc.com/images/moblog-30-4-07/SolarUMPCTour.kml”);
map.addOverlay(geoXml);

Once you’ve done that, upload the RoboGeo dir to your server and link to the map.htm file.

Here’s one I’ve just made with a previous RoboGeo route and photos and if you zoom out you’ll see the start and endpoint for the tour and the current location of my bike. The great thing about it is that as you update your ‘My Map’ the created map changes too as it pulls in all the data from the Google servers. Wonderful!

I’m now off to do a bit of shopping. Packet soup, sultanas and muesli bars. Yum yum! create some maps!

And that is about as good as its going to get I think. Time is running out fast and a good weather window is approaching. ‘Only’ 20-30% chance of rain. 6 hours of sun per day. 28th, 29th and 30th don’t look too fantastic but I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the risk. The Solar UMPC Tour is under starters orders!

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I know that weather is supposed to be chaos but this is just silly. The most settled weather we’ve had this year was back in April and since then its been a real mess. It doesn’t look like it wants to change much either. The whole of central Europe is stuck in a mess of clouds that does not want to move and bizarrely, Helsinki, the place I’ve just come back from in northern (and generally colder) Europe is expecting a ton of sun!

Getting everything re-organised in another country is not something I really want to do to be honest. There’s a lot of cost and time issues that would make the project too much trouble for me and my sponsor, VIA Technologies so once again, I’m going to wait. The 9-day forecast takes me up to 18th August. After that point I have about 5 more weeks left in the summer before the sun gets too weak.

The  latest weather report is still bad. No chance of leaving in the next 10 days unless the weather report is wildly wrong.

Its unbelievable! We  had the hottest, driest  April ever and since then the clouds and rain just won’t go away and summer storms are threatening almost every day. Looking at the sun graph for the last three days I doubt I could have got get even a few hours of computing time out of it.

It gives me more time to set up more tests and products of course, but I’m really keen to get going ASAP, especially as I have a holiday booked with my wife on the 19th July. The last possible leaving date for the tour would be 8th July. After that point I won’t be able to fit it in and will have to wait until 28th July.  This is really frustrating. I’ve been planning this since late 2006.

On the upside, I tested out the bike with full baggage tonight. It was just a 10km round-tour in Bonn but it was a good test. I’m hoping to squeeze in one nights camping this week so that I can test all the equipment out together.

I’ve also heard that there’s a possibility to get a Reware Juice Bag. That makes me happy! 

Isnt it typical? Just hours after starting the solar panel testing last week it started to get cloudy. You can even see the first clouds appearing on the sun power graph that I used on the first test.

Ever since then the weather has been bad. Look at the last three days below. With weather like that I would have no chance of charging anything. The forecast for the next 6 days is the same too.

The only good thing about the rain was that I was able to re-test my old tent. I suspected it wasn’t going to be water resistant any more and I was right!

As for the bike, i’m really thinking of doing it on the Kronan bike now. Its a solid machine and the seat is really comfortable. I’m going to order a couple of new tyres and some spares this weekend and get it back up to match fitness.

The first of my planned start dates is approaching. I was hoping to start on the 21st May but thats just over a week away. Its not looking good. I am looking at a second date now (10-19th June.) just in case the outlook dosn’t improve in the next week.