Hello and welcome to Daily Planet. I am Ziya Tong and I am Dan Riskin. We got all kinds of innovations on today's show.
We're going to check out a new spin on the bicycle wheel, because, yes, it's time that we reinvented one of those.
Now a segment that proves that you don't necessarily have
to be an expert to realize your dreams, or in this case,
This is going to be good, wheelie good. My name is Mike Burtov
It doesn't spin like a regular wheel, it doesn't look like a regular wheel - and it packs a ton of power.
My name is Dakota Decker and today we're putting our latest prototype to the test.
We invented a new type of wheel
A wheel that can house all sorts of components inside the wheel.
Anything you want you can put in it.
I was watching Tron and I thought that is a really cool bike, I really want one of those bikes
so I thought why don't we put a motor, why don't we put a battery inside that wheel
and I thought you know what let's do this and I left my job and I started building.
I have zero engineering skills, I have zero engineering background
I cobbled somethings together just to prove the concept
I made it out of really heavy, really inefficient materials
the design was just atrocious. Looking at it now it's embarrassing but I am very proud
was able to do with absolutely zero skills.
I showed it around to people after it was sone done, a few people
and the reaction I got was outstanding, it was amazing. I knew was a big idea.
I'm amazed at how far he got having no mechanical engineering
background, he did very well with that and from there he
found at me and our other coworker Gideon
we're both mechanical engineers by trade so we had the experience and expertise
and skills to actually take that initial prototype that he had created and
make it into a working version that can actually go on a bike. We removed all the spokes
and instead put rollers around the outside, so just the tire is spinning
nothing internal to that. And that freed-up all that space to put the
motor, the battery, the controller and all the electronics
everything you need to make electric bike
you can put anything you want in there. I mean we have headlights on one of our
you can put like a TV screen in there to be an advertisement,
you can put a coffee maker you want, you can put a cell phone charger you can put a compartment to
hold your phone, or your backpack, or you books - or anything you want in there.
As an academic experiment, yeah, we made a very cool looking wheel,
but to actually make it something that's useful, something people can use on a daily basis
this was our biggest challenge. For this bike we're targeting that it's going to go
just about 20 miles an hours, which is about 32 kilometers an hour
and were shooting for a range of 20 miles miles, as well - about 32 kilometers
on top of that if you want to peddle, which most people who have a bike will want to peddle
you know, double, triple, quadruple that.
Our biggest challenge today is testing this new size of wheel that we are using for bikes.
Testing it on different bike frames - and we don't know how it's going to react.
Bike are extremely not standard, so we want to make sure that
this works across different riders
When people see it, they don't know how to react
it doesn't make sense. Everybody stares, everybody always stares
this is something fun, something that the've never seen before. Imagine a wheel rolling down
You know, even when I look at it still doesn't make sense.
There are a lot of surprises but a lot of fun. A lot of fun. It performed great. I had a lot of fun writing it on
on grass. I mean it performed better than I expected.
There's a couple tweaks, there is definitely a couple of tweaks but it performed great.
And it held up to a lot - that wheelie test. I mean, that thing dropped like
4or 5 feet straight on there and it didn't even faze it. I'm really impressed with that.
I mean, we were kind of worried about having no traction in the water, but it seems
like it didn't even faze it at all.
I was watching a movie and I dreamed up a thing and I had actually
That's the most amazing thing. It wasn't just me, of course,
it was an entire team, but we actually did it. The dream
is actually right there behind me. That's an amazing thing to me.