Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

cyclingtips.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 205 posts

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#131

Post by mikeyouse »

guyzero wrote: post #26
celticninja wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a different type of motor. If you watch the video the back wheel slides along sideways for a while. This would stop all usual motion of the wheel and there is no way that it would maintain sufficient power to move the bike as it does even if there was some residual rotation.

What kind of motor then? Wheel hub motors are sufficiently large that you could recognize one from meters away. There are only so many places to put a motor on a bicycle and at some point you have to come up with an explanation for what happened that doesn't involve a motor.

I'm not saying that's what he did, but they have very clever (and expensive!) electromagnetic wheel motors that can provide ~50W of power for extended periods that likely wouldn't impact the pedals.

http://cyclingtips.com/2016/02/electromagnetic-wheel-motors-...

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#132

Post by Mikeb85 »

Just be like formula 1 - create passing zones where they can use the motors (I know it's DRS and not the motor, but that concept) remotely disable them otherwise. Regulate everything.

Cycling needs a shake up, way too many scandals recently...

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#133

Post by gambiting »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #3

What about Ryder Hesjedal's bike spinning on itself a few years back? Are we addressing that as well? It feels like the UCI is only going after easy pickings to prove a point and not doing its best to actually to fight mechanical cheating in fear of yet another scandal.

Ride any bike, let it fall off - it will do exactly same thing. The video that was posted doesn't prove anything.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#134

Post by sksksk »

mirekrusin wrote: post #97

Why do they care about such a niche/illegal market, this idea is fantastic, imagine Boris bikes in London for example - they could recharge batteries when docked, it would be awesome to have this kind of engine in those tank-bikes. Extra points - please distribute heat on the handles because it's often cold. Thank you.

A few cities have electric bike systems, particularly cities that are quite hilly, for example Madrid's BiciMAD[1]

[1] https://www.accessiblemadrid.com/en/blog/bicimad-public-bike...

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#135

Post by nl »

ars wrote: post #105
mikestew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have to distinguish between output meant for a program and output meant for human. That pretty much defines my career, yes. Say someone gives you a logfile of problematic transactions - you then have to convert all the numbers to decimal points before using them in some one-off program that checks them. Say someone gives me a MongoDB full of transactions that need to be transformed into relational data for our…

I'm not trying to be annoying - I'm simply curious. I never had to deal with that (internally that is, I do localize for end users - but that data is one way), and I was wondering how people handled it, that's all. Sounds like it's a bit annoying, but you just deal with it because you have to. I guess it's a slight extra use of time, but nothing major?

Much, much worse is the US mm/DD/yyyy format, especially if mixed with DD/mm/yyyy format, unlabeled, in the same file.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#136

Post by guyzero »

mikeyouse wrote: post #131
guyzero wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of motor then? Wheel hub motors are sufficiently large that you could recognize one from meters away. There are only so many places to put a motor on a bicycle and at some point you have to come up with an explanation for what happened that doesn't involve a motor.

I'm not saying that's what he did, but they have very clever (and expensive!) electromagnetic wheel motors that can provide ~50W of power for extended periods that likely wouldn't impact the pedals. http://cyclingtips.com/2016/02/electromagnetic-wheel-motors-...

These "motors" aren't expensive, they're completely theoretical. There's no proof anyone has built a frame-rim reluctance motor anywhere ever. The linked article literally says "So, is an electromagnetic wheel possible? Yes, in theory" and has no concrete examples of one ever having been built.

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#137

Post by ars »

nl wrote: post #135
ars wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be annoying - I'm simply curious. I never had to deal with that (internally that is, I do localize for end users - but that data is one way), and I was wondering how people handled it, that's all. Sounds like it's a bit annoying, but you just deal with it because you have to. I guess it's a slight extra use of time, but nothing major?

Much, much worse is the US mm/DD/yyyy format, especially if mixed with DD/mm/yyyy format, unlabeled, in the same file.

See, that's kinda my question. As a programmer I refuse to use anything except yyyy-mm-dd, unless I'm forced to.

So do Europeans analogously refuse to use anything except decimal points, except where they have to?

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#138

Post by ars »

imtringued wrote: post #114
ars wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing code is not that tough in Europe - just use a proper i18n library. That only goes so far - the actual code you write has to use decimal commas. You can't even export, say a list of numbers, and then directly copy that in to your code. Or for example: Use SQL to print a list of numbers to use for testing queries. If you used i18n, all the numbers would have decimal commas, so you can't combine them with a co…

I'm not sure what's so difficult to understand about calling a function like parseInteger(userEnteredNumber, defaultLocale) on user input and then calling something like formatInteger(numberToBeOutputted, defaultLocate) on numbers that will be shown to the users. Programming languages already have a fixed representation for decimal numbers that will be used regardless of the user locale which is generally always with…

It's more the confusion about seeing two kinds of numbers.

If I see:

123,456

Is it a list of two numbers? Or a single number with a decimal?

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#139

Post by mrob »

rasz_pl wrote: post #55
huphtur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That news article may not be entirely correct: https://www.eptc.co/watts-the-deal-with-motors/

This guy analysed a control image - image taken of a KNOWN bike with a vivax motor - and came to a conclusion there is no motor in that picture.

What's more it claims that friction is the biggest source of losses in an electric motor, when it's actually a very minor source of losses. The biggest losses are from resistive heating. See section "Motor Efficiency" at:

http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/products/reference/15297

Re: Hidden motors in cycling: Van den Dreissche banned for 6 years, titles stripped

#140

Post by BoppreH »

jokamoto wrote: post #15
VeejayRampay wrote: post #3

What about Ryder Hesjedal's bike spinning on itself a few years back? Are we addressing that as well? It feels like the UCI is only going after easy pickings to prove a point and not doing its best to actually to fight mechanical cheating in fear of yet another scandal.

That's already been demonstrated to be a side effect of a still-spinning rear wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak7xP8eghog It should also be noted that "incident" occurred on a fast downhill section while Hesjedal wasn't pedaling so even if there were a motor it is exceedingly unlikely it would still be engaged at the time of the crash. With a plausible physical explanation and no way to go back in time to chec…

I'm not convinced. Compare:

https://youtu.be/ynLMfzLTc8M?t=8

and

https://youtu.be/Ak7xP8eghog?t=13

That was the best run in that video. The wheel spun less than 180 degrees after being carefully placed on the ground. In the original video the wheel was in contact with the ground for seconds before it got free to spin. It then spun for more than 180 degrees and seemed to be accelerating.

I know such motors are supposed to stop when you stop pedaling, but it could be a different one. There's still enough evidence to look damning.

Post reply on HN