With inspiration from the scraper bike culture we wanted to design a pimped out version that would function during the night time as well.

The scraper bike culture is defined in the urban dictionary as:

“A new trend that is a part of the San Francisco Bay Area Hyphy Movement in which people ride their tricked out bikes and go stupid, dumb, retarded while on their bikes. Generally, the bikes have nice designs, such as duo-tone paint jobs, and rims or spinners. The term was coined by the rap group Trunk Boiz of Oakland, California.”

Besides “pimping” an old rusty bike up in colors and patterns, we used the concept of persistence of vision to light it up in the street at night. Persistence of vision enabled us to write out text and pictures as the bike moved through the streets of Copenhagen. The lights were controlled by an Arduino ADK board and a Xperia phone mounted on the handle was used as an interface to control the different patterns and colors.

This project was a part of a larger exploration with Xperia Studio. We want to convey the message to the world that technology should be designed to be remixed, hacked and customized by its users. The process was filmed, and will published as part of a larger promotion about the phones.

Credits: Sonny Windstrup, Maria Lund, Dan Schou and Mads Høbye
Soruce: https://github.com/Illutron/ScraperBike