A post from the Brim Blog

Welcome to the Brim blog! We plan to use this to let you know how we’re doing, to keep you up to date with what’s happening around the Brim Brothers development labs, and generally to waffle on about anything on our minds.

Actually, at this stage the “labs” are still my garage and Ian’s back bedroom. Most of my days at the moment are spent working on the force sensor design, and I think we have the basic ideas proven on the bench. It’s great to be back doing some real engineering again. In my early days I worked on various systems in telecommunication and process control, including  a startup at Microsol, but in recent years in the Dublin Institute of Technology my job was becoming almost 100% administration and no actual engineering. I’m really enjoying getting back into solving real engineering design problems.

I know it’s a cliché, but we really are very excited about this project. The further we go the more we think it’s a great idea. It’s completely different from any of the five existing systems that measure power. Every cyclist we’ve talked to about it has said “put me down for one of those!”. Reading descriptions and reviews of other power meters we look at their drawbacks and we know ours will overcome them. Now we just have to build it.

Obviously we can’t reveal everything yet, but our new approach will make training with power so much easier to do (that’s not quite true – the training will always be hard, you’ll just get more from it). The system will be able to make a whole new level of detailed information available to coaches and riders.

One question everybody is asking us is the obvious one: when can they get one of these new power meters. Well, we’re only at the early development stages so it’s going to be a while. Possibly very late 2009, but more likely sometime in 2010.

We’ll be adding more facilities here on the website over the next few weeks. We’ll be providing ways for you to keep in touch with us, and to give us your comments and questions about what we’re doing. We hope to put up some interesting photographs as we go, and of course there will be more here in the Brim blog about our progress.  I’ll write some more about exactly what we’re doing, but not so much that I’d have to come around and kill you!