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iBike: Taking a Look - Part 1
by The Bike Messenger

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Published: 04/04/2007

First Look: iBike Powermeter

First of all, let me point out, that the iBike is more than a power meter - much more. The power feature is a sum of several calculations made by collecting other interesting data, and aggregating it into a number that reads as watts. Unlike other powermeters, that work essentially like an electronic "torque wrench" (tensionmeter) to measure your power output (whether in the rear hub like PowerTap or bottom bracket like ERgomo or SRM - the gold standard of power meters...with a price tag to boot) -- the iBike measures your power output by taking several other variables into account in order to measure power. As Newton put it - "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction"

This is what I mean when I say that the iBike is more than a power meter. It is a speedometer, accelerometer, altitude indicator, cadence monitor, wind speed indicator, thermometer, and inclinometer (is that a word? now it is -- percentage grade). That's right, the iBike, for less than half the price of even the most affordable standard power meters, is giving you all of these features.

Let's look at a couple of the features in more detail and why they're interesting data to see:


Accelerometer
(CORRECTED April 24, 2007)
John Hamann, one of the founders of the iBike had this to say about the Power Bar:

Matt: As I mentioned this is our "PowerBar". It gives an INSTANTANEOUS report on watts used. It is much quicker to respond than the screen above it. The PowerBar goes from 0% to 100%, where the scale is the number to the right of the bar. So, if the bar is on the 800 scale and is the bar 50% full, your instantaneous power output is 400W. The reason your PowerBar switched today is because you exceeded 400W; when that happens the scale immediately shifts to the next highest level (800W). So, you got an accurate reading of maximum watts. Please let me know if you have more questions. Thanks, John

Also in the picture above, you can see that there are read-outs for speed, watts, trip distance, and RPMs. That's a lot of data for one screen. At first it can be a bit confusing, but once you figure out what screens are where and how the buttons interact with them, it's nice to have multiple bits of data to evaluate. By now, you're probably asking yourself, "Does this guy ever look up and see the cow pastures as they pass by?" - yeah, but data keeps it interesting when the scenery gets boring!

That's the end of PART 1 of taking a look at the iBike...in the next installment (part 2) I'll take a look at a couple actual power charts from the iBike and talk about some of the other features that it sports such as elevation and percentage gradient readouts.

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