My New Wireless Bike Computer
June 25th, 2008 | by Daniel |I found that the more into biking I was getting, the more I wanted to keep track of my stats. I decided to get myself a bike computer, and when I went into Duke’s on Monday to get my derailleur and brakes adjusted I also bought a Cateye Strada Wireless for the decent price of $69.99.
Once I got home I popped open the packaging and figured it’d be a pretty easy installation. The whole package is basically made up of a magnet that goes on your spoke, a sensor on your fork, the handlebar mounting bracket and the computer itself. The instructions were thus fairly straightforward, and I managed to get everything on the bike easily. “Awesome”, I thought, before realizing that the thing wasn’t working.
The computer wasn’t getting a signal from the sensor and after much tweaking and frustration I realized that it was because the sensor was too far away from the magnet on the spoke. I was a bit confused by this initially since the diagrams in the instructions showed a wider gap between the two components, yet the written distance was 5mm. 5mm seems awfully close, and because the distance in the diagram seemed much larger I assumed it was a typo. In any case I got it working and I’ve been really happy with it.
The readings I’ve gotten from the computer confirm the distance from home to work that I’d worked out using Bikely (give or take a few metres) too, which is pretty cool. My route to work is about 7.9km each way.
Now that I have the ability to collect all this data, I figured I might as well do something with it. I whipped up a quick spreadsheet using Google Docs and then decided to take it a little bit further by adding a chart to track my progress. I’ve published this on my Bike Stats page. I’m sorta new to all of this, so if anyone has any ideas on useful stats to track, please let me know!
