Professional mountain bike racing is a rather bizarre sport. At the highest level, times between podiums will be less than a second, and countless hours of training and engineering go into those fractions of seconds. An all too important tool for the world cup race team is data acquisition systems (DAQ). In the right hands, they can offer an unparalleled suspension tune for a world cup racer. Sadly DAQs can cost thousands of dollars, so [sghctoma] built one using little more then potentiometer and LEGO.

The hardware is a fairly simple task to solve. A simple Raspberry Pi Pico setup is used to capture potentiometer data. By some simple LEGO linkage and mounts, this data is correlated to the bikes’ wheel travel. Finally, everything is logged onto an SD card in a CSV format. Some buttons and a small AMOLED provide a simple user interface wrapped in a 3D printed case.

Analyzing the data is a rather daunting task. The entire analysis framework is neatly wrapped into a web server. The DAQ can automatically sync with the web interface, and provide suspension metrics in conjunction with action camera footage and a GPS track for further analysis.

However, not all is as it seems when it comes to correlating the suspension data into such a nice UI. A key issue is that with four bar, or even six bar, mountain bike linkage designs, the leverage ratio applied to the shock changes through the wheels travel. That means, when measuring shock travel, it needs to be adjusted to find wheel travel according to manufacturer specifications.

You need to be a bit of a suspension wizard to make sense of the charts. Nevertheless, for the mountain biking hackers out there, everything is available on Github, so if you wish to analyze suspension performance, make sure to check it out!

This isn’t the first time we have seen mountain bike data loggers, make sure to check out this simple Arduino build next!

From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed