Recently I spent half a day trying to find a shop in Tallinn that would have a universal PDA/phone/GPS holder for bicycle in stock that would be able to hold the Openmoko FreeRunner.

There’s a suitable one described in this blog post but since I had a ride planned for the next day ordering it from Germany was out of the question. So I quickly hacked something together myself. It isn’t exactly beautiful but at least it’s extremely sturdy.

Here’s how it looks in action:

Basically I cut it out of 2mm Al sheet (actually chasis of an old tube amp). After that it was more or less just a matter of bending. There are some pictures of a similar but a more beautiful holder project here, sadly my metal saw is far too wide to cut such nice round curves.

We rode for 4.5 hours and it was -7 degrees C (19.4F) so I was very positively surprised that the battery of FreeRunner held up for so long in that kind of cold with GPS enabled & TangoGPS running. Actually when I turned it off it still had about 20% battery remaining.

Here’s our GPS tracklog @ OpenStreetMaps