 Okay, so we have Speedy, we have Scoody, welcome and enjoy and have a good time. We're happy you're here. Thank you. Hi, Speedy and today we're going to talk about OpenCoil, what it is, what it is not, our motivation for this project, the technology behind it, the technology we used and some funny things we encountered along the way. Stay until the end because we will be sharing some of our builds so you can replicate this yourself. Please enjoy the talk. This is all live, so we're not sure what's going to happen, but we have a trusted clip board here, so I'm confident we can do this. How about you, Speedy? We'll find out, right? So let's dive right in. What is OpenCoil? You can see a bunch of scooters around us here. OpenCoil basically is a concept for a mobile art show on these dockless electric sharing vehicles or in short vehicles that can be rented via app. It ran for one week, end of October this year. Basically, the two of us, we came up with this concept and we then invited 10 artists to share their works with us and present them on these e-scooters. OpenCoil builds on the idea of the speech show as well as offline art and maybe some influence of the debt drop as well. All brilliant concepts by media artist Aran Bautol. We basically, for OpenCoil, we basically took these ideas and tried to merge them together into a concept that then uses non-destructive add-ons that we can put on these scooters to host the artworks by all the individual artists. Basically, once these scooters are modified with our add-on, we can release them into the streets and they become available for the public in the whole micro-mobility service area. We came upon this idea because we wanted to interact with these micro-mobility services. Basically, OpenCoil, it appropriates their infrastructure. One thing that is out there for everyone to use, and this OpenCoil concept, it appropriates this infrastructure as a decentralized network of nodes, scooters, and then we can share artworks on all of them. The artists, we invited them. We wrote them an email about this idea we had and we told them, okay, so we're looking for small art pieces, art that can be stored on two megabytes of storage. The response was overwhelming to us as well because we immediately got responses from a bunch of really, really, really brilliant artists out there and they all helpful and supportive and actually created most of the work that you can see or you were able to see in the show were created for this show, especially, and they were all then optimized to be viewed on mobile devices since this roaming speech show is actually decentralized and you would need to go into public space, find the scooter, connect with your phone to that scooter via Wi-Fi and then the artwork that was stored on the scooter was visible for the visitors of the art show. All of the artworks are somewhat context-specific works. They all deal with either movement or just capitalism in general. Some of them even with the pandemic since obviously this all came about while the pandemic was happening. The concept really, it wasn't really pandemic driven but maybe accelerated since while we were already working on this concept, we realized all these restrictions and restrictions that came upon the general gallery industry or where you would normally go as an art enthusiast to look at art, they were all sort of limited in what they were able to present, what they were able to offer and a lot of the galleries, more traditional galleries, they then moved all of their available shows to the online, some of them in very interesting and creative ways, others really just pictures of artworks they have hanging around in their galleries and you could just like click through a slideshow and that basically led to us thinking, okay so how about we take net art that is usually already presented in the online world and take them offline just to show okay so there's actually maybe different solutions that are still completely pandemic friendly to present art in the offline space other than just going online. There is for example this work here, it's Sarah Grant's contribution to our show, it's a little mobile game that deals with pandemic as you have like you have to fight little coronaviruses and it's like based in the city of Berlin which is where open coil first happened so this work is really nice to show how involved the artists were with the concept of open coil and how creative they got and to develop art that is suitable for this. So in short we had a small gathering here in front of the Zentrum Finetskomst in Berlin to have like a small test opening to like for all the artists and friends who like see the artworks and for us to test our heart and software test if everything was working the way we was supposed we thought that we thought it would work and we found a couple of bugs we found a couple of issues which we then were able to solve in time for the official opening where we would then release all of the scooters onto the streets of Berlin to be actually fully publicly accessible and then watch our scooters move through Berlin that is basically the whole concept. Maybe Speedy can say something or Scooty can say something about why we even used scooters in the first place. Yeah so like both individually were already like very interested in this whole movement of these micro mobility services in general and especially scooters specifically. It's very strange to overnight be confronted in your city with a bunch of highly technical species occupying the same sort of ecology as you are and this really made us think like what are these animals or things or species. It immediately triggered also questions about public space itself whereas before it might have been you know unnoticed but all of a sudden this semi-public space was occupied by like private private companies vehicles and it just brought up a lot of emotions in not only like artists or researchers but also like with normal people and you might have seen the gut reactions of a lot of people who could not park their bike anymore on the streets because it was occupied by a bunch of scooters such as throwing them into the river or you know breaking them on purpose and while this is a reaction coming from from the people who engaged suddenly they all like they all experienced the same thing that we experienced that all of a sudden overnight there are these thousands of new well things occupying the same space that we regularly occupy that we will live in and yeah that triggered emotional responses and yeah a lot of critique yeah and it's it's it's just very interesting to to see this sheer amount of technology that these species are carrying with them and how this is sort of dumped freely on the street to to yeah interact with you know normally you would use a mobile phone to rent these rent these cars or scooters and drive around and get charged in our credit card but yeah we were sort of looking for ways to to um yeah regain sort of agency in this in this sort of newly newly created ecology where seemingly anyone can can occupy or take this probably good and we were very interested in in the ways how these companies also did this so yeah that that also led us to to the to the next to the next part of our sort of interest like how to engage with these scooters not by renting them but in a sort of public way so instead of looking for back doors or box or whatever how can you engage with these these practices of sharing vehicles venture capitalism in ways that are like publicly accessible without breaking anything and yeah so but by by sort of chance was like a year ago we tried to to like charge a phone on a on a scooter we found on the streets and it would actually charge it without renting it first so in a way we discovered that we had like we discovered free energy um and this is just a one more yes yes yeah we we found the first entry point the first portal of communication that made it available to us to engage the scooters in a different way than that maybe the the micro mobility service intended to and also um this just opened up uh motivated us to do um to do a different approach yeah so um there's actually two main ingredients to our project um that are actually focusing on on how to publicly approach these things um one part is is a software part and the other part as said before is a hardware element um so before going into the software maybe you can we can briefly explain um that these models that are shown here um actually are outfitted with a little charging pad so under under the steering wheel there's a sort of clip where you can mount your mobile phone on and if it's compatible with wireless charging it will charge your phone while you're driving it around which is nice because yeah if you run this thing and you run out of battery and you cannot lock it again yeah you have a problem I mean I'll like this service line um without the battery so this is a sort of nice service that goes both ways I guess um the other part is the the the software part maybe speedy you can tell us yeah um basically after we discovered this first entry point we just tried to think of of other things that this these micro mobility services will hand us for free that or that are publicly available and um we found out okay so the next major thing that these that of this major like block of information that they will release um without account app anything is uh the locations of their scooters and their battery status and stuff like that it's all if you download their specific the specific services app um you'll see without even logging in creating an account putting credit card information down or anything you'll already be able to see um where the scooters are located um what is their license plate number or um i click their their vehicle id um as well as their their battery status and um basically we um looked a little deeper and and and we've we found um just lying around uh on the internet um we found a an api key that was previously discovered by a guy who discovered by a guy who let him put it on a github which we found um and then this this api key basically um gave us the capabilities to run api requests and like get responses with all the information that we needed to develop our open coil concept further so um basically um what we did we we built the website um for optimized for mobile devices obviously that would then um allow uh its visitors to locate the scooters that we had modified and totally those so not all the scooters as in all the scooters that would usually show up in your in your app just the scooters that had our um arch gallery modification on them and we found out about different statuses that these scooters can have through the response that we got from the api for example if um someone rents out the scooter that has this gallery space its status obviously changes from available to unavailable so that um another user of the micro mobility services they wouldn't see the scooter anymore on their app because someone else is already using it and we implemented these different statuses in our um in our website as well to um better show or or or to well notify um visitors of our gallery when um a scooter becomes unavailable because it's either rented out or maybe it's battery drained or it got damaged overnight all these different things we basically found out while observing the behavior of these um vehicles over time and we figured okay so there are all these different um statuses that um they can be in um which we can implement in in in our um in our website to make um to make it more clear to our visitors which scooters are actually available to be located in the wild and watch the artwork that is on there and which of them maybe aren't anymore um yeah here you can that this is that these scooters can be in and it shows um a lot about the scooters and it always shows their current location um so as soon as we basically had this these tools um we immediately noticed that uh as soon as we like put these scooters out we had very low expectations of like the general life cycle of life expectancy of one of our modules because looking at the scooters and looking how they were treated by the public we had we were like very um curious to see like how long our modules will actually last and um just looking at the map and like um reloading it all the time um to see if something changed um it it was fun it was it had a fun it has it had us it had us it had us um physically engaged with the scooters again because we were like sitting at home and um reloading the website all the time to just like to look where our scooters are where our babies are whether they need service and we would then like every time something changed every time like a scooter's icon switched to like maintenance or um battery or something we would then um like drive there and look if our module is damaged in any way or if it's like broken if it's still working and through through through this engagement we um yeah we've we just um found out uh so much more about how these services operate and and how um yeah how the scooters are actually used um and yeah we we we were taking good care of these like modules that we had put on which is um the hardware part of our um of our concept and maybe we can tell something more about that yeah so up until now um there wasn't a single hack really um we are we have just been using like publicly available um accessible resources to build like an alternative infrastructure on top of an existing one um um as speedy just showed we created a map to to track all the vehicles we had outfitted with um with our sort of hardware implant or parasite if you like um which is basically a replica of the um existing charging port for your mobile phone on the on the scooter so um we have some points lying here around also in real life um and yeah maybe we can just sort of like walk you quickly through the technology uh we developed to sort of harness the the free energy available on these uh devices which again is uh it's a feature it's not a bug um so if we start um here I'm sitting right on top of a microcontroller with wi-fi um ESP12F um that creates a wireless hotspot and runs a web server that can contains the the artworks um so anyone could connect to it with a mobile phone or or a laptop and um they will get a little pop-up on android it's sometimes a bit more difficult sometimes not um it will it will present you the the artwork that's um that's running on it um if we go a bit further down there's a a little black thingy it's a voltage regulator that um guess um that turns the five volt from the the charging coil into 3.3 volts for the ESP um if we follow the the green line it's our custom PCB we made to sort of snugly fit all the electronics into the the replica of the of the charging pad um you'll see a beautiful copper coil with some electronics on it um this is a sort of soldered DIY module to create your own um like phone charging station or device or whatever and it is capable to turn like the cheese standard wireless charging uh standard developed for for mobile phones which is alternating current um it turns it into a direct current of five volts um that can be in turn used by the ESP after it's being shifted to 3.3 volts um yeah I mean I would say that this um we use the different versions of this coil in the process and um originally this like board set up here like just the coil and the and the small board attached to it is we found these were boards that were created to give this wireless chi capability to devices that didn't have that before so um basically make everything chi capable which is the standard that these charging pads were using so we just took one of these uh to charge our or to just power our gallery chip yeah there are also other models that are sort of adapters for older phones so you can turn your old phone into a wireless chargeable phone um some of these they require some modifications which we will later share as well um yeah maybe one fun thing to notice um is that um yeah there's no way to connect to this thing uh physically so yeah one of the limitations of two megabytes uh comes from the fact that um we can update these microcontrollers over the air so we can update the firmware running on it using wifi and yeah we actually did not password protect this left it intentionally open in like the hope that someone would find a scooter on the streets um find this this this strange module and then um yeah we'd be able to like repurpose it for his own uh for his own goals um one of the sort of goals uh was to to make it sort of uh easy to apply uh easy to remove um and non-destructible and i think maybe the the the most important thing or the most um is is not hampered by this uh or obstructed by this add-on so you can still charge your phone um um if you put it on the pad so here you see a little slideshow of how to mount our um yeah replica parasite so it easily slides on the existing um charging pad uh i would say the only difference is um the rubber uh and my slip rings and of course are sort of yeah hand-painted stencils of the logo yeah but basically the purpose of this was just to create this um mostly invisible add-on that uh might then be like well will not be found by um someone um who's not looking for it by accident and then be like removed immediately we wanted it to be like very stealthy um for for it to last longer i guess and these like shells that we vacuum molded they like fit snugly onto the original board and they just snap on the the plastic protects the chips inside from the from from the weather and then yeah once they are mounted the esp gets powered by the scooter and the wi-fi becomes available and you can just um as soon as you're in range you can um see the network on your phone you can connect to it and a pop-up portal will show the artwork that is on there yeah so you don't have to be like that close to the actual scooter to uh Fiori artwork Fiori artwork no yeah and basically after we've created this um thing we um then uh we we mounted it uh onto a bunch of these scooters that we found to be charging uh even though uh they weren't rented so giving out free power all the time we mounted them uh those modules to to to them and then yeah as we said early after our little um um opening uh uh we just put them out on the streets and we're hoping that they were the traveling that they will be traveling through the micro mobility service area on them um themselves um and you can see we um freed the scooters all within the area of Neukölln in Berlin and you can see uh some of them basically stayed in Neukölln for the whole duration of the show others moved quite far like to bedding and uh Charlottenburg and stuff um but yeah we were very curious and and and we looked very closely um into that data and you can see after maybe two or three days uh one of the scooters made a like huge trip to like Spandau which is actually outside of the normal service area of this um of these scooters and we were super curious um at first we thought oh this is some drunk driver who over the night took a scooter on a road trip for four hours and ran until the battery died and we were very worried about our module and we wanted to see you as we said in the first couple of days we were super worried about them and we immediately um decided to like step on our bikes and and bike there to um see what was wrong with uh or if there was anything wrong with the scooter how it ended up there and yeah that's how we arrived here yeah that's how we arrived here this um place here is um the backyard of a tier service facility so it imminently became clear to us that uh it wasn't a drunk driver we're drove it here it was actually one of the service technicians um that was on the regular basis service servicing these scooters and we hadn't noticed the scooter status change to like damage or something so we couldn't get to the scooter and remove our module before it was taken here so yeah we just followed the API here to this location um and um yeah so we found that over the course of this week um maybe three scooters ended up here um and uh as we said they they as we found out them there were a couple of workers driving around on these the mopeds that you see here in the back um they were moving in and out of the warehouse and we um quickly engaged with um with the workers there and yeah we actually um this like as we said we we previously found this this uh bug of sorts we never found out whether the the possibility to charge a phone even without renting the scooter is a bug or if it's a feature we realize there's a specific number or a specific version of the scooters that are available for this we realize okay there's the those scooters that start with the two set their their IDs will start with the two seven or sometimes a two eight and they will all have a helmet box as we saw in the first picture they will all have this like black box on their um steering and uh we searched the API for these specific models and then uh tracked them through the through the API and well it led us here to this um very real back door into um the workshop and uh yeah just this this new world of or this new layer of the this these these companies became very um very invisible to us and obviously um all we cared about was our scooter we wanted to see if it's still alive if it's still uh sending a signal so uh why don't you follow us into the warehouse tada here we are um this is uh what we found when we entered the stream yeah all these scooters uh basically yeah all of these scooters were um in need for repair and there were a bunch of technicians working on them as we said we we talked to one of them and he was very friendly um to let us uh take a peek inside and and take a look at yeah how how these scooters were serviced and yeah a lot of realizations came from that yeah so speedy well what what actually happened to the parasite yeah well you still see it yeah we immediately uh yeah we immediately took out the phone and we searched for the wi-fi signal and uh well plague rave 2020 the work by sarah gand it was still there it was though the wi-fi signal was really strong we were super stoked about it but looking at all the scooters and i mean some of them are completely taken apart we were sure that um this this parasite of ours will eventually get uh well found and then we destroyed um so we were we weren't able to locate it inside the area um we were also thrown out shortly after taking this picture because apparently you are not allowed to take pictures in um this facility so yeah um that was a interesting uh layer indeed uh on top of just you know chasing scooters on the streets and looking at maps um this this displayed a whole nother level of physicality uh to us and um made us realize actually um what we had become so over the yeah the short short while during the the one week of the exhibition we actually realized that we we sort of became an ad hoc sharing company ourselves uh we found ourselves uh running around berlin um trying to you know see how our modules were doing also to see if the scooters were still okay um because yeah if they were fallen over they yeah we had to put them up again so people would rent and and they would get charged again so our module had to take care of our gallery hosts exactly um so i don't know if that's a symbiotic relationship we were in but um and of course yeah we we also used the api in the same way the company does to track to track your to track our modules um so um this place here also so yeah it it it just blew and blew our minds basically um that um you can use this publicly available um map data basically to find out where these scooters are going and we were actually surprised to see that they're actually being repaired um and not just you know uh recycled um as you see um they're actually like sorted by different levels of um yeah damage uh here down on the floor there are some that are where the steering wheel column is like completely broken off um yeah these will be repaired or decommissioned um we actually decompiled the application used by the people who work here it can be disfound in the app store yeah for each each uh micro mobility service they basically um have an app that is publicly available that all the users will use to track their scooters and then there's also an app for all of these service technicians all of the people who um go on nightly trips to replace batteries and yeah well do what we did for a week uh check on check on the scooters and um in in a way with yeah yeah if they need repairing they will end up in this place and they all have this this app for for tierics it's they're called rangers the people who collect them and switch up batteries and there's a shelter app which is probably used by the people here inside this warehouse because while decompiling it we found all these new statuses that these scooters can be in where they would have very specific um information about the sort of damage that was done to the scooter whether it's a gps issue that brought it here are or just a damaged blinker or steering wheel or something all of that was sort of like within the api that we found yeah so um speedy how how many of the of the parasites did we actually end up losing yeah that is uh very interesting because we um as i said we we found this place and we uh got thrown out of it immediately and we we were sure it should never see our module again and for this specific module it actually took quite a while like we talked to one of the service technicians he said usually scooters can be in and out of here within days for our scooter it took almost two months to be back on the street as soon as we realized they that the scooter is back on the street actually we lost during this week we lost in total three modules to this place and all three eventually came back on the street so that's a good thing they actually all three um were able were able to get repaired and yeah we did what we did we tracked them down and we looked at them and we were extremely surprised to see that our modules were still on there they were still working fine they were in perfect shape the scooters were repaired and the galleries were back online yeah so a possible explanation for this um we basically don't know um i we can't believe that that our our like um adam is so um our replica is so well done that uh person who works with them daily uh wouldn't notice in a blink of an eye when we would you know walk in berlin on the streets we would just spot our our models instantaneously from across the street without even checking your wi-fi or the map but yeah another explanation could be that these scooters are actually evolving and also migrating so yeah as you might have noticed if you live in a city where these e-scooters are driving around like almost every yeah three months there's there's a new model going around um either because all the ones are being decommissioned or or whatever and maybe yeah um our module was yeah seen as just a new another prototype or a new model roaming the streets um yeah i mean these these people who work there they didn't seem to be um actually working actual employees of tier they seem this this warehouse it seemed to be there before even tier like it seemed to be this workshop that was there prior to the micro mobility industry um popping up in berlin and basically it seemed to us it seemed as if this space was just rented out and these workers were just told to from now on repair these and yeah as as scudi already said like within the time frame we were closely engaged with these scooters we we've seen probably three different models um pop on the street so it's it's not super unlikely that the workers there they just thought this they were meant to look like this uh another funny coincidence um one day we found one scooter had migrated to uh marseille in france possibly to look for better weather because winter in berlin is of course very cold and dark um but then we noticed that um it was next to a ruhrit which is like a german engineering company and equipment rental and when we actually visited this this space in berlin we couldn't help notice that the map showed a word next door as well so there's a there's an interesting connection there or maybe not maybe it's just coincidence but two of the scooters that were taken from us one to marseille one to here they both ended up very close to a good store so i don't know if there's a connection between those two and also the scooter that was migrated to marseille it was an older version it was an older model and we quickly realized that it seems in berlin specifically because tier the company that owns all of these scooters it's a berlin-based company and it seems that within berlin they try to only operate with the latest models and older models will be either decommissioned or migrated to other locations where maybe their presence is not as prominent as in berlin yeah so to sort of wrap up our sort of approach in this it was sort of a way to get to know these companies and these devices and sort of try to figure out what they are we sort of used like the tactic of of art or the excuse of art i would say as a way to deal with these invading species but yeah that's of course only yeah one way to to to deal with this we already mentioned people yeah responding in ways that are destructive and maybe not so environmentally friendly because these devices although claimed by by all the companies to be like CO2 neutral of course still contain like 20 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries and yeah if you look around here how many how much material there's like seriously on the streets and being put into this especially considering the new models every couple of months this thing is just so fast and evolving so fast and i guess we we can all remember the the pictures from we china and their bike graveyards because previous to this version of dockless sharing uh micro mobility we had the rental bikes we had all these different companies in berlin dumping their bikes in the streets in a very similar way to where to like how we came upon these beautiful creatures and they all disappeared i mean in berlin you can eventually spot a broken mobile bike on a few corners but the app disappeared from the app store and basically they just disappeared and they ended up on graveyards in china and yeah power city or we call this add-on power city gallery this was just sort of our way to interact with the scooters and then see if like they will run into a saying in the into a similar faith maybe yeah so yeah in our sort of research or or journey um we we mainly used the like you looked at the api and sort of reversed engineered some apps to to gain some more knowledge about this whole ecosystem um but of course you can also look at the economic models of these companies you can go to crunchbase website and and see who invests in what and and who buys who um you can follow there is a connection between vert and tear in the end maybe you'll find that on crunchbase and of course there's a the very rich language of marketing that's being deployed by these companies and um very interesting terms of services and privacy statements um where you will actually yeah easily discover that um yeah most of the the eco-friendliness is is mostly outsourced to to third parties um for example the recycling of tears is done by deutsche recycling um their co2 goals are offset by climatepartner.com and yeah as speedy mentioned this this whole space here is it's it's also not owned by here it's it's another contractor owner contractor owner contractor creating um yeah um a lot of small small jobs uh in this big chain of basically already laid out to be a very momentarily and um it seems that all of this is very yeah just during the pandemic you would see within weeks uh whole hospitals will be created and this sort of uh seems a lot like this this is just a pop-up hospital for scooters and um it will exist as long as scooters exist and as soon as they are like they have evolved to the next version of the micro mobility um this will be something else again exactly um another thing you can do is uh for example yeah um if you do want to do some non-destructive um armchair reverse engineering you can go to the fc database fc.io and um yeah look try to see if if the electronics are registered there and mostly you can find pictures of the actual electronics that are inside of these equipment um yeah so the fc is the the american sort of um radio watchdog um taking care of the spectrum emissions and there's also there's also the way to um do something similar to what we did um decompiling all of the available apps to find all the little new entry points as we said the the api key that we um used was previously discovered by someone who did just the same he decompiled the tier and he found this api key just hard coded in there and um we found out that there are different types of api keys out there there are the ones that the users um will use so if you're on an app an official tier app you'll use a different api key than the one that we are using because for example on the tier app you'll be able to um bring a scooter and like have them blink uh in the street to be more easily located that's for example something that we couldn't do with our key um and there is more to be discovered within these apps and also as we said the the other apps that exist from from these sharing companies another entry point is the the physical scooter itself um yeah you can notice that on the bottom there's often a large amount of stickers um a lot of times it contains the FCC ID where you can look up the electronics inside but also like the the original manufacturer of these things which are mostly I believe come to come from China and um yeah if you know like the manufacturer if you know the manufacturer and the model you can look for like service manuals or uh yeah manuals in general and get to know some of the more features of these devices so for example on some models of scooters you can see here um there's a little um black bar uh at the front um on the top of it there's a there's a sort of eye uh with an LED in it um but some of the the um how to say some of the manuals actually um provide a little indication of an optional camera to be built in so maybe that's the the next step of the evolution um that these sort of scooters can you know observe themselves and their environments um yeah so these are the ways we we we we thought of like approaching this um and we sort of now want to ask you like um or offer you a little hand in in how you could possibly approach this um yeah earlier this year we did um a workshop um around this topic um in BKV and Stuttgart and we um basically um we had already uh come up with this concept of ours this concept of the roaming speed show and well we were sure that this single this single entry point of the charging pad this this option for free um electricity um it could be like our our way of using it it's just a one little like possibility that is out there and we were doing this workshop we actually um had a couple of wooden adapters made that would also snugly fit into the um into the um smartphone holder with the chi coil um and it would allow the participants of our um workshop to create their own add-ons to um to see uh for possibilities for themselves to um sort of um increase the the value of these scooters to them personally because we found that a lot of people were criticizing these scooters simply because the solution that they that the the the micro mobility industry um said that they were they were this this beautiful climate neutral solution to a um a mobility problem that existed in um in urban areas we found that um this solution this scooter solution to a lot of them doesn't exist it's it's it's useless these scooters are useless they are not solving this this problem for a large part of the people and we were just thinking okay so if these scooters are here to stay um what is the only good thing that they can offer well it's a large infrastructure and it's free energy for some of them at least and we invited participants of our workshop to um just think of more ways other than the gallery add-on think of more ways to um engage with the scooter and increase um well usability or or just value of these scooters pcb is that we created for the um for the gallery is just put inside the wooden block and um instead of powering this wi-fi chip you could just use the power to power whichever other um um device you want um in this case a toothbrush for i don't know free charging up toothbrushes on the street forever that is valuable a thing a thing it's the new thing i heard it's the new thing i heard i heard too yeah so um in the end here we basically want to take the same approach we want to invite everybody um to maybe think of uh solutions themselves maybe think of um um a way of communicating with these scooters themselves to just get a better understanding of the industry of the way the industry works and the way we can actually benefit we as the general public because obviously a lot of the stuff from these scooters is is actually not for the public or at least not for the general public and um we invite you to actually think of um um hacks uh add-ons modifications where that um that will for you solve this solve solve a problem um we have created this github where we share um a couple of nice goodies with you guys yeah so um we're actually uh intentionally not sharing um our sort of original wi-fi uh modules schematics and code because we think that can be found in Berlin still we share all of the information on the gallery um add-on if you actually go to Berlin find our scooter that we um provided in the open coil show and um yeah you can log on to the wi-fi and download all the schematics there but this is something different yeah the url for that you can actually find on on github um on the at the url you see above and now our server will die yeah hopefully not um yeah so on the on the github you will find like plans um how to modify uh like cheap um cheap adapters to work uh with these cheap coils um you will find a positive uh mold for a vacuum forming your own uh adapter that's 3d printable and um you will find the the wooden block that's uh either laser-cuttable or CNC-able um yeah this is really nice because there's holes and you can just you know use a hammer and and some nails to to to mount whatever you want on this um yeah maybe to to sort of wrap up this kind of technical talk in some ways um this is of of course not a purely purely technical project by uh to brilliant artists um this this project is is you know running for half a year now it's uh it's like an accumulation of of social contacts and friends and um spaces but also knowledge that has has been um you know um been exchanged over over at least 10 years time um so it's it's actually a very very big social part in this project um yeah and in the same way I think we believe that um also just dropping technology on the streets isn't going to solve like uh social issues or environmental issues um and yeah we want to sort of you know connect with you and try to think of yeah try to think of other ways to do this to actually um yeah make something make a difference in this industry um because I think there are enough possibilities enough entry points enough front doors really um to to engage with the scooters to like find out stuff about them and yeah and and to sum this up yeah we just want to give in the end we want to give a shout out to all the participating artists like everyone who was like immediately on board providing uh incredible artworks for us to present on our modified scooters um we're very very overwhelmed that like just that are so many artists were even like considering participating it was really overwhelming and we um want to like give a huge thanks to to everybody who um work with us on that we we also want to mention uh Centrum Finets Kunst who hosted our opening um event especially Teresa she like did a lot of work for us um and yeah all of this just wouldn't would have been possible without um this community of of artists and just random friendly people who um help us with with this thanks and thanks to the ccc for hosting us yeah thank you um let's go to q and a let's go to q and a go to get up download our stuff hack some scooters find solutions to problems that's so nice of you thank you so much it's been a real yeah totally new perspective on on these uh strange little things that's crowding all the streets everywhere even if i've already thought um what about cars the cars need much more space move that's another idea yeah and they're just much more difficult to hack we found uh yeah maybe maybe we should have an outside hack but i just wanted to say um we're very sorry we had some problems with the with the audio in between it wasn't too much but um still very very sorry for that and um unfortunately we can also not um guarantee that it's going to be better on the media ccc de but it was still okay you know in germany it's all still new yland so maybe maybe we just need to be a little more patient and let me just uh jump in here and um repeat once more uh the github address that's github.com slash speedy minus scooty slash open coil and while we're at it we're very happy if you would also give feedback for the um for the talks you can do that in the far plan um not in the blinky fancy app um uh in the normal far plan and there's a feedback link and um you can tell us what's been good what hasn't been good um of course we know there's sometimes technical problems but i already heard that the target show which is our biggest news show in germany uh public television they even had to stop their um show today because of problems so we're not the only ones we're not alone and yeah um we have a lot of questions and finally we also have a lot of time so um i hope that we're ready now to maybe switch to these questions let me just check that okay so first one about maybe they clustered for for different topics maybe you want to choose the topic first um about the project in general about the implant um about the api about the hardware about off topic what what are you going to start with off topic off topic honestly sure of course are you aware of any back up doors back doors with these scooters not really i mean we're not even uh sure that what we have found is actually above we we've just found this open coil um that gives out free energy and we're not sure if that's a bug or a feature actually so i mean yeah it's it's a feature in a way that um yeah you're like allowed to charge her phone um when you're rented so yeah maybe there's someone in the audience who can sort enlighten us about this maybe please drop a note on twitter um with the hashtag um rc2 uh rc3 2 sorry um um yeah uh or on irc um next off topic question how did you do this awesome presentation i know but oh green screen thank you yeah it's been it's been nice to go outside while not going outside okay next topic yeah yeah it was like the only way that we could be together and yeah yeah true yeah it's it's nice to see yeah i know what you mean uh hardware implant api or project you choose is goodie oh uh api api is this api still open yes yes please don't close it we want to do this show another time another place please please don't close it or you take the next the car project remember okay what are the most interesting funny unusual things that you have seen with the api ooh that's a very good question uh there were some some funny um repair statuses like uh destroyed or something uh yeah some we're really obviously pointing towards decommission highly decommissioned highly highly decommissionable yeah yeah just the general stuff that we figured out oh okay so apparently the scooter that was in berlin two days ago is now in marseille this this alone was a weird coincidence and then i don't know if you've noticed but um the the during the screen recording of our website you could actually see that currently one of the 11 scooters we chose um to host our add-ons moved all the way to pot stop which is also definitely outside of service area and as far as we can tell there it's not another workshop it's just the residential area and um maybe someone check it out yeah maybe okay drop of the line have you seen any interesting moving patterns on other than the trip to the repair facility okay we had that i guess um okay maybe we go to implant now is that okay or however sure okay so uh sorry if it was already said how expensive is the implant if you buy it in bulk it's it's around uh five euros i would say okay yeah it really depends on on like the scale you want to do this obviously we bought a bunch of uh ESPs and stuff we because as we mentioned before we we were expecting these things to last to not last as long as they they did and um we bought a bunch of them so um we got them for very reasonable but also we had some issues with delivery on time um out of like china obviously doing due to corona in a way um so we had to last minute switch to a to a more local uh supplier and this supplier like he only had these these uh these adapters that you would plug into smartphones all the smartphones that that don't uh have wireless q capability so we just ordered a bunch of these adapters and then uh we like took them apart and just like we just like took the parts we needed and and they didn't work yeah at first they didn't work we had to like look at a picture of the the version of this hardware component that we previously had and we realized oh just by comparing the two pictures we realized oh there are like two more components of this board and we just sold them off and that bridged like two pins and then they worked again so there was a lot of weird quirky like sort of hacks that we had to have had to do just to um get the get the modules working in time and obviously if you're like if you're on this tight schedule then um things might get more expensive but yeah it's always five versus money um did the technicians find any of your implants yeah as far as we know they didn't or maybe they took them to potstump maybe yeah maybe maybe maybe we go to hardware before we come back to the project in general i think the hardware of some of these devices is open source do you have an idea where to find a plan to copy it um i guess the devices are originally attached i saw i didn't get the last part and that's an that's another comment um that's uh belongs to it i guess the device originally attached you know the plan of the the charging the charging pads the charging pads they are attached to the scooters they just come with the scooter um as we said in our presentation you can try to like go through FCC's website or just look at the serial number and and FCC numbers on the scooters themselves to find out more about the hardware that's inside these the scooters and inside the charging pad that is attached to the scooter when it comes to our hardware um that the the the gallery module that we attached to the scooters that um we we haven't we did made it we did make it publicly available but only if you find our scooter in Berlin and log on to its network and download the content we will not share it online ever it's gonna be offline on a scooter in Berlin for as long as the scooter exists okay why didn't you just open the battery pack to get voltage and place the module there um this is i don't know um i think these batteries run on 42 volts or something yeah and also we were about to find a hack that's non-destructive we we had already seen all of this destructive criticism of these scooters we've already seen what how people um in general react to these when they don't like them and we just wanted to find a more clever way of of dealing with it and um there are probably a lot of possibilities to gain access to the power or or even other features of this um these scooters and you're free to do modifications on scooters yourselves but we for this project we wanted to look for a uh stealthy non-destructive non-invasive uh parasite that would just extend um the capabilities of the scooter without interfering with um with its original business model yeah you could try mounting like a bicycle dynamo on the on the wheels maybe yeah yeah why not um okay anything else you want to add to the technical specifics okay then project in general what are the reasons to decide to make the gallery available for only a few days i'm not sure if this maybe was a misunderstanding but um no it's sort of a sort of understood correctly the show the open call show it only ran for a week in berlin that is due to um one uh one reason was that we just didn't imagine this this module to last that long and we didn't find out until long after the show that it would actually um survive a trip to the warehouse so after a week we thought okay this is just too too much work because as we said we were really like on our bikes every night checking on these modules checking on these scooters it was a lot of work and um yeah this was just not we couldn't keep this sort of um we couldn't we couldn't be a sharing company for forever yeah maybe maybe i don't know maybe there's another way to document it in some some way or so well now that we know that these modules are way more durable than we imagine we um as we said we are thinking of or we definitely want to um repeat this show uh in another time another city because the good thing about these scooters they're everywhere now and as far as we can tell this solution that we came up with it works in every city so um you're we also hope that we can repeat this somewhere else some other time and maybe um have it be available longer or actually for as long as they will last yeah yeah other plans to make roaming galleries of other types of infrastructure like cars or in general what um what are you planning to do you have any plans what you want to do with it in the future is there anything coming up that's a very very tough question now first we go for the cars maybe we can do like a like a project where people can join in freely yeah well i mean there have been like like many historical examples of you know uh you know public free uh shared uh infrastructures and um a lot of art projects as well for like netlis uh for example by dania vasili of um using the the um subway uh carriages to carry about like mesh network routers um you have this uh tram jam uh project that use trams as musical sequencers um very nice projects uh something i can imagine is maybe like a collaboration with freifunk providing mesh wi-fi mesh nodes on roaming devices um but yeah it's really hard to sort of see the future in times like this yeah maybe you should go out and find them out there and just have it go out and find them it's in the rc2 world and chat about it um exactly one of our livestream chatters uh just shouted to please share the api key so google is your friend you good yeah there's this get there's this get up but okay i know i know yay um is there maybe um if there's more questions or interest is there maybe a place an assembly or a special bar where you're hanging around later on or tomorrow here at the rc2 world um i'll see freifnaya you know what i mean later out there yeah yeah actually um i would like to hang out in the hardware hacking area of the the workshop area in the in the world it's a nice place yeah maybe you can type the api key there i mean copy paste it it's a bit long to you know mention it here we'll take all night okay uh obviously this question is very interesting so they keep keep putting it back so have you seen any interesting moving patterns other than the trip to the repair facility seems to be very important so what have you what have you been finding out well it was just interesting to see um from what we could tell by looking at these 11 scooters specifically we um well they were mostly being moved during the night or like even in morning times and not so much during the day um they some of the scooters we uh selected they've never they've never moved out of no current one scooter didn't move a single time during the whole time we we watched it and others made really long trips as you could see in the animation there one was like going crazy towards bedding and then um meeting called the bitnik scooter was just like after one day was in shalom book and like uh alone yeah one one interesting thing is uh for me was that um the the rangers or the juicers the people who swap the batteries um yeah like at the night of the opening um yeah a couple of our scooters actually ran out of battery um that's when we decided to end the show and yeah within five minutes there was this sixth rental car arriving with a dude jumping out swapping the batteries um yeah with the perfect uh the perfect ending to our show we had just removed the the modules we had just saved them and then these like guys jump out the the this van and then swap batteries on the scooters and like nobody believed that we didn't actually plan this that it wasn't like a like a theater piece but it it was just a nice coincidence one of the many coincidences that made this project happen in the first place um I just uh had to laugh because um we always say we bully us we don't leave our kids you always stay in your kids so maybe some of the uh the scooters had the same um approach to just stay definitely i cannot move out of there most of them most of them have the excuse me yeah you're absolutely right the scooters seem to have adapted a very similar lifestyle yeah okay there's still more questions are you still willing to take questions sure sure okay cool would you consider doing some work around the badly parked scooters for people who are blind or visually impaired did you notice this issue while doing this project uh do you have to repeat that question huh um he's asking and those scooters are parked everywhere very badly and it's a it's a dangerous thing or blind or visually impaired and uh you probably noticed it and maybe you could add this as um as an aspect or yeah definitely there's that's one of the the many things that we um invite people to like um maybe look out for to uh i mean there are a bunch of people listening who are way more talented than we are in all sorts of coming up with code and and ideas and development ideas to create add-ons for these scooters and obviously there there are problems with these scooters that we didn't even think about um we just try to find one solution that would make them more interesting to us and obviously um there there's a need for for improvement on many levels and um yeah using using this uh charger maybe there's a way to like mount a sensor on top that would then like give a um sound feedback to once you're approaching them or something um we haven't thought of anything yet like a boy or something yeah yeah well thank you so much um at the hardware hacking hacking area and the playground area i don't i don't repeat that now um your scooby and speedy tattoos goody and speed yeah it's the same name you're walking around like this no no then you have to find a way to make yourself remarkable in some way well you can also always drop us an email at mail at opencoil.show um it's probably gonna get flooded now and maybe you'll take a while until we can respond but it'll get to us eventually okay so thanks so much that was it thank you yeah enjoy the program and have a good time thank you everybody and thank you for being here speedies goodies have fun bye bye bye bye bye bye