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Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

outsideonline.com

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Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#61

Post by bamboozled »

stevenwoo wrote: post #26
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #3

I'm not sure who's seriously interested in most of these features, fun factor nonwithstanding. One of bicycles' strengths is simplicity of critical elements, notably the gear switching. How do they make sure that the electronic system doesn't die on the rider when the battery goes flat? How do they deal with increasing slack in the lines? Who really benefits from turn signals? Unless they are mounted on special stalk…

I agree with you but Shimano has kind of built their entire business in the bicycle market on planned obsolescence, changing the number of gears to make equipment incompatible every few years and then making the highest end shifting electronic (and incompatible with prior versions) when they reached the practical limits of chain width for bicycles (they tried introducing a new standard chain size for bicycles that re…

This is a pretty good point. I also wonder how fixable bikes will be once they're "smart" and whether or not will still maintain "the right to fix".

One of the reasons why I absolutely love cycling, is that my bikes (and those of friends and relatives) are one of the only things left in my life I can fix myself, I save money and learn a lot from doing it, it's rewarding and incredibly cheap.

It would be really disappointing to see parts become a black box, more expensive and disposable.

Leave it to the eBikes I say.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#62

Post by jacquesm »

stbtrax wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Anything you strap to a bike has to be reliable. If there is one thing you can say about mechanical systems it is that we know how to design them so they last the lifetime of a bike (wear parts excluded), anything electrical or electromechanical will have a shorter life than the equivalent that uses only mechanical parts. Just look at your average bicycle light set, even after I don't know how long we still can't mak…

Electronics, if weatherproofed properly, will last a very long time. They don't have any wear and tear like mechanical parts so I'm not sure what would degrade other than the battery or misc connectors.

Cables, servos, brushes, switches and so on.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#63

Post by theparanoid »

soared wrote: post #42
stevenwoo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already impossible to park a non department store bike of any value anywhere in an urban area of the United States without the risk of it getting stolen. It's probably one of the factors in why some people might not commute for errands even if everything else was favorable - a bike decent enough to warrant a ride is a target for thieves. The bike thief community in San Francisco/Oakland/Santa Cruz has been thriv…

This is plainly not true. In 99% of America (read: not cali, nyc, etc) if you lock your bike up it won't get stolen.

I'm in a suburb and had the seat stolen off a department store bike.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#64

Post by mr_tristan »

Automatic lights would be amazing in ridesharing bike systems, like Nike's Biketown that we have here in PDX: https://www.biketownpdx.com/

I see these fancy "smart" features very useful for making biking convenient and simple for very casual biking.

Hard core bikers already are happy for the most part, and probably only care about shaving off marginal amounts of weight.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#65

Post by orbitingpluto »

blang wrote: post #4

The grumpy old man in me likes my bike to be as mechanical as possible, I don't want to remember to charge my shifters, power meter, gps, etc. Maybe that's why I still ride a 1989 Trek 1200 with down tube shifters and biopace chain rings.

You didn't even change the biopace rings? Those are murder on your knees. Can you even buy biopace rings anymore?

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#66

Post by KGIII »

stevenwoo wrote: post #41
KGIII wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn signals... Could it just be a small and lightweight LED panel that flashed a bright arrow pointing in the intended turn direction? With LED, it can be pretty efficient and still be really bright. I would think a blinking bright arrow would be fairly universally understood.

One issue is that now a lot of riders are using blinking lights all the time when riding for visibility reasons (during the day), so the arrow would need to be big enough to differentiate and visible front and back so now we could be talking about something much more obtrusive. If they're on the back, there's a limit to how big one can go (on easy to mount positions) because the rider's legs/feet/butt will strike pro…

Could they turn that blinking light into a an arrow at the appropriate time? I ride a motorcycle and have upgraded all my signal lights to the maximum legal output.

I would probably test to see if changing the colors was also effective. I don't think it would have to all that large, maybe half the size of an automobile license plate. When it is just going down the road, flash white. When it is turning, flash orange or red - in the shape of an arrow.

I'd test that and see how people responded to it. It might not even have to be that large. I'd just want to make it large enough that the arrow can be made out clearly and from, say, 100 feet away. The changing color may also help.

I suppose orange would be fairly standard and might be a good color choice to try.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#67

Post by orbitingpluto »

mi100hael wrote: post #34

Lots of negativity in here. Most bikes with DuraAce components already aren't the sort of thing you'd leave out on a city street unattended. One cool thing that stood out to me was that these monitors will transmit data over ANT+ or Bluetooth. As someone who already tracks all my workouts w/ a Garmin watch, I welcome the ability to track more metrics like power output. Gives you a good way to objectively track your p…

The other nice thing about BT instead of IR is you eliminate the risk of cross contaminating signals. This is most likely a common cycling in the 90s story but I use to have a heart rate monitor and one guy I would ride with had the same device. His monitor would usually pick up my signal, but not vice versa.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#68

Post by mcbain »

jacquesm wrote: post #8

Anything you strap to a bike has to be reliable. If there is one thing you can say about mechanical systems it is that we know how to design them so they last the lifetime of a bike (wear parts excluded), anything electrical or electromechanical will have a shorter life than the equivalent that uses only mechanical parts. Just look at your average bicycle light set, even after I don't know how long we still can't mak…

The in-frame patch panel (aka junction box) may require pulling a few other things off the bike like the cranks (if access is through the BB cluster) which is often only a few minutes work when you have the correct tools.

Which leads to the fact that many bike tools are incredibly specific, and require updating almost more often than the parts they are meant to be used with. Insert old joke about standards and having so many to choose from - but that's an issue that stands to the side of electronic against mechanical parts.

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#69

Post by stevenwoo »

soared wrote: post #42
stevenwoo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already impossible to park a non department store bike of any value anywhere in an urban area of the United States without the risk of it getting stolen. It's probably one of the factors in why some people might not commute for errands even if everything else was favorable - a bike decent enough to warrant a ride is a target for thieves. The bike thief community in San Francisco/Oakland/Santa Cruz has been thriv…

This is plainly not true. In 99% of America (read: not cali, nyc, etc) if you lock your bike up it won't get stolen.

I will grant you by virtue of there being more people in California and New York City, there will be more of everything. But for there to be $350,000,000 US worth of bicycles stolen every year (estimate is old) the problem is more common than you might think. https://priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-st...

Re: Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

#70

Post by brians »

stbtrax wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Anything you strap to a bike has to be reliable. If there is one thing you can say about mechanical systems it is that we know how to design them so they last the lifetime of a bike (wear parts excluded), anything electrical or electromechanical will have a shorter life than the equivalent that uses only mechanical parts. Just look at your average bicycle light set, even after I don't know how long we still can't mak…

Electronics, if weatherproofed properly, will last a very long time. They don't have any wear and tear like mechanical parts so I'm not sure what would degrade other than the battery or misc connectors.

Capacitor electrolytics.

Air bubbles in silicon, thermal expansion, and a zillion day night cycles.

Humidity and dust enter, contributing to occasional momentary shorts.

Oxidation anywhere you have electromechanical connections.

Magnetic stresses on any coil, any rectifier.

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