A post from the Brim Blog

A progress update is overdue, I think, as it’s been a while since the last one. The major event in the last couple of months was the online survey we ran in February. We were amazed and re-energised by the huge response we got to the survey and by the many messages of encouragement and support. We got responses from more than 25 countries all over the world, and from 45 different states in the USA.

We’re still analysing the results in various ways, and extracting much interesting and useful information. One statistic from the survey, which you may find useful when trying to explain to your non-cycling other half that having so many bikes is normal, is that almost 70% of cyclists said they owned 3 or more bikes, and 1.5% said they owned 10 or more bikes. One third of respondants claimed to do over 5000 km per year, but we suspect that for some of them that may include the kilometres they intend to do rather than just what they actually do! Fits right in with my new visualisation training technique – I lie down, close my eyes and visualise the whole training run. Then I go asleep to recover!

Thanks to you all for the many messages of support – it really helps to keep us going through the hard times when things aren’t working out and we begin to question why we’re doing this. We also got offers of help with testing (many!), offers of cooperation of various kinds, and suggestions for special applications of our technology. There’s huge interest in what we’re doing, which makes us all the more determined to produce a system that will work well.

Development work is proceeding. Slower than we would like, but we’re making progress. At the moment we’re working on the processing algorithms to produce power figures from our sensor measurements. Some contributors to online discussions of what we’re doing have remarked that the algorithms will be difficult. That’s an understatement! We’ve been doing lots of what my family calls “hard sums” to come up with version 1 of our algorithm, and we’ll be testing and improving that over the next couple of months.

We’re also working on how our system will integrate with ANT+ devices. We haven’t decided yet exactly how that will work, so we’re exploring a number of possibilities. We’ve also been reviewing and progressing our patents (amazing how time has flown by since we lodged our first application).

There’s still much development work to do – sometimes it seems that for every problem we solve another one becomes apparent. In true engineering style we keep knocking them down and slowly working our way to a solid well designed system. No shortcuts – everything is researched and tested until we’re confident we know exactly what’s going on. Lots of “hard sums” involved!