Garmin support my upcoming project ‘Ride’
Following on from the recent conversation I had with Garmin‘s Laura Tomei at the Fermynwoods event Art + Satellites, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that they’re supporting my upcoming project Ride (Birmingham – York) through the donation of a Dakota 20 navigation device. This should mean I can actually find my way to York!
Ride has come about from a commission from VINYL: you can read some of my early thoughts here and hear me talk about it in this talk I did for Pecha Kucha Night Afternoon Coventry:
PKN Cov Lunch Nikki Pugh HD from MINDRIOT PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.
Short version: in September I’ll be cycling from Birmingham to York whilst streaming data back to a reactive sculpture somewhere in Brum.
Meanwhile, the Dakota arrived the day before yesterday and I had to set about learning the language of Garmin devices. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but I’m starting to get the hang of it now!
After a quick play and familiarising myself with the menus and settings, I naturally wanted to take it out on the bike to see how it behaves in use.
This required molishing a quick bike mount. Here’s what I came up with:
PCV foam board with cable-tie holes and velcro slots
And here it is on the bike and out and about
It worked really well – only coming off when I hit a pothole at 26 miles per hour!
Even surviving canal towpaths!
Anyway, a brief moment of DIY bodge glory, as yesterday a RAM mount arrived in the post.
I didn’t buy any of the mounting component stuff, just the bit that clips directly around the Garmin. Yesterday I made do with simply cable-tying this to my handlebars, but this morning I’ve attached it onto a spare light mount to produce this:
So, off we go into the wide yonder to find out what this thing can do and what I can do with it!