A post from the Brim Blog

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is reputed to have remarked, when someone suggested that he should give up trying to make the electric light bulb work, that since he had already found 10000 ways that didn’t work it followed that he must be much closer to finding a way that did work. It feels like we’ve found about 10000 ways that don’t work for our force sensor, so I’m hoping that means we’re very close to perfecting it! Actually, we are making progress, just slower than we’d like (as always with design). We’ve solved quite a few very difficult technical problems, but we still have some left. A lot of the work at the moment is just making small modifications and running more bench tests. It’s very routine most of the time, and can even be boring, but it has to be done and it has to be done right.

Of course there are lots of other aspects of getting this venture off the ground, and they take a sizeable part of our time, but the main focus at the moment is to get the technology right. We intend this to be a dependable robust product. That means that the core technology must be carefully designed.

Our general plan is to move to road tests of early prototypes in the next couple of months, and then to go through a series of evolutionary refinements as we get more understanding of the behaviour of the system. In parallel with this we will be running some basic market research, including an online survey. We’ll be inviting all serious cyclists to participate in the survey, so that will be your chance to influence the design of our power meter. If you want to be sure you’ll know when the survey is running then stay in touch with us via this website, and make sure to subscribe your email address to our news list (use the form at the top right of this page).

Thomas Edison also suggested that innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. We had the 1% inspiration right at the start, now we have to do the 99% perspiration – so I’m off back to the bench and more testing!