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Scientists Build Wireless Bicycle Brakes
itwbennett writes "Computer scientists at a German university have built a set of brakes controlled using a small motor for a braking mechanism and a wireless signaling device to tell it when to brake and how hard. 'Making a popular set of bike brakes wasn't really the point of the project,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty. 'The project was to find out how to make the wireless connections between two components of a system that has to operate in real time – with milliseconds of difference between success and failure (PDF) – more reliable than systems that are normally connected by a wire.'"
I haven't had a head injury in a while, where do I sign up to try them out?
Works GREAT... until the battery dies and you hit a car.
In a police state the cops will be asking for remote overrides of these wireless brakes. Police cars driving past and asking to pull over will be a thing of past. Now they just have to override your wireless brake.
Smart, because wireless is always more reliable than wired. Oh wait, it isn't.
My solution would have been to fill the cable sheath with silicone grease. Lock out moisture and air; prevent corrosion.
*fiddles with directional antenna on a dumb white-noise transmitter, readies camera*
How many times has my wireless bike speedometer failed? This could add a whole new dimension to bike riding!
It must be great to rely on wireless breaks. This is even better than fly-by-wire. Can't wait for fire-by-wireless.
Check, check can't connect to breaks.
Welcome to OnStar, can I help the police violate your rights today?
Awww, did a cyclist steal your boyfriend mid-fuck?
I guess I am not understanding the issue here but how is adding touch points reducing the failure rate? Regardless that is fixing a problem that does not really exist.
I know people who ride competitively, reliability is key and introducing more components that can break or add weight is not going to get acceptance. Modulation is key and I really doubt you can simulate that with any wireless system.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
To be useful, this would probably have to include some kind of force-feedback, so you know how hard you're pressing. You can't deduce this from lever position, because the brake pads wear down over their life. So, you'll need a motor in the handle, as well as in the brake itself.
On the up-side, it will mean you can incorporate front brakes on those BMX stunt bikes where some of the tricks involve spinning the handlebars all the way around.
Also also: "brake" == device for slowing something down, or the process or effect of slowing something down; "break" == to damage or destroy something, the act of destroying something, or a gap or discontinuity. FYI.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Don't you just peddle backwards?
Wireless systems... needing power and chips and antennas and receivers and complicated communication protocols... more reliable than steel wire... Hmmm... Best of luck with that!
I don't respond to AC's.
As an active cyclist, I would never use such a device that has no merit other than "it can be done." My safety will be entrusted only to the tried-and-true steel wire conection.
This isn't about wireless bike brakes, it's about reliable, real-time wireless connections. Surely that's something nerds can find a use for?
1 in a trillion. Yeah right. What happens when someone signal jams my brakes, or you are driving past an electric fence, near lightning or some other failure. I will let others be the guinea pigs.
im waiting for the headline bicycle hack makes bikes flip end over end
lets make that fun happan ... jam on front brakes for a split second when riding above a certain speed
So I actually RTFA, and the first half is basically, "If you use a fixed allocation of time slots to each side of a communication channel, you get less packet loss". This is great best practice advice for real time systems where loss is unacceptable and each side has a small amount of predefined data to transmit. The end of the article however applies this to wireless networks in general, saying that network admins should see if their WAPs support this fixed allocation. That application is completely and utterly wrong. The problem with fixed allocation is you need to know up front how much bandwidth to allocate to each sender. Get that allocation wrong and your users will be suffering with horrible lag while most of your bandwidth sits idle. Obviously there is just no way a network admin can know the exact allocations needed. No way at all.
Why don't they go full Java Enterprisey Enterprise Edition Library - Government Edition, and make a hamster-fart-powered brake factory factory-making Rube-Goldberg machine factory production contractor factory... factory?
Then at least it wouldn't be trivial. :P
Someone needs to give one of these bikes to the Jackass guys - with a 2nd remote control.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
...Will make brakes that stop working for like, no reason?
Sorry, but TFA is hard pressed to convince me a wireless connection will be more reliable than a wire (even with consideration of the mechanical connections). I'd not want to be in a airplane that used fly-by-wireless instead of fly-by-wire.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
For airplanes, helicopters, and spacecraft, a significant fraction of the mass is in the wiring harness. As a result, there's a lot of interest in wireless interconnect technology, to the point where they're actually doing it. In commercial aviation, wireless is used primarily for non-critical functions (entertainment, airconditioning controls, etc.), but there are military helicopters which use fly-by-wireless at a significant mass savings. All that mass that isn't in copper/insulation/supports can go into payload or armor or other "useful" stuff.
The research reported here is interesting, but it's not clear that they had really studied the existing state of the art. Going to fixed slot allocation in a TDMA system is an obvious performance improvement, but oops, it requires a) preplanning and b)enough bandwidth to accommodate worst case demand. And that costs mass/power/money. So what you REALLY need is a robust, reliable demand allocation system so you can deal with reconfiguration (oops, engine control unit 1 just was disabled by shrapnel, switch to engine control unit 2) and load changes (switch to zero visibility landing approach mode), etc. Some form of reliable mesh routing would also be nice, because box A in the nose might not be able to see (in a RF propagation sense) box Z in the tail, so the message needs to be deterministically forwarded through Boxes B, C, D, etc.
And as for all those bogus comments in the thread about interference, and reboots and such.. Doh... do you think the guys and gals designing wireless flight control systems haven't thought about that. Of course they have. Thats the *first* thing that people ask about.
No, Engineers built them. Doesn't matter what profession these guys have or what investigations into the universe they do while on the clock. This development is outside the realm of question, therefore it's not science, it's engineering.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
The summary says with milliseconds of difference between success and failure, but the article and paper says it has to react within 250 milliseconds - that's 1/4 of a second. My cable brakes react much quicker than that.
Calling that mere "milliseconds of difference" is like saying something that costs $2.50 costs only "pennies".
Hey enjoy your ever increasing gas prices, fucktard!
Can the motors in question apply the same amount of pressure that can be produced by squeezing the human hand?
...someone figures out how to send a brake command to other people's bikes from a laptop? Even better yet, just send the brake command to people's front brakes... flipping them over when they least expect it! I imagine sitting by the window in a coffee shop while all the bikers who attempt to ride by are in for quite a surprise.
I like my brakes reliable. I know as a BMXer when the current trend is to go brakless I sound like a heretic. I'm old. I'm an old-school BMXer, I think the trend is stupider than these brakes, but at least someone who follows the trend knows they're riding without brakes unlike the people with these wireless ones.
I would be worried about other problems. When I ride my dork bike I have a pair of Cy-Fi Bluetooth speakers on my handlebars blaring AC/DC and Beastie Boys at people I pass. Every time I stop at a stoplight something happens. My music get interrupted. I'm not sure exactly what goes on with stoplights, but there's very definitely something going on wirelessly that interferes with my Bluetooth speakers. When I got caught at the train tracks the speakers were out for more than just the little blips stop-lights create. This isn't metal from the train blocking my signal, the phone that the music is getting streamed from is in the leg pocket on my carpenter pants. I would be worried about this phenomenon not only engaging my brakes when I don't want them engaged, but also preventing them from working as well. This isn't just failure after poor maintenance and abuse, this is every single stoplight in the Houston area and I'm sure other places as well.
I'm glad they aren't looking to deploy these yet, and I hope they don't. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a simple wire. It's also the same reason Soviets in MIGs could pull off maneuvers our pilots in F-whatever planes couldn't because the electronics wouldn't allow them to.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Granted, it's probably far into the future, if we ever do go this route... think about cars that drive themselves, or even that take some level of control in dangerous circumstances. I think there are already cars now that can sense the distance from themselves to the next car in front... what if a control system like this could be added to allow such cars to have more information and to coordinate with each other?
This could allow such vehicles to avoid collisions, or at least minimize their effects - something very worthwhile. I'm glad to see this sort of project come through and succeed - we need reliable, split-second wireless communication because it gets us a little closer to such a dream.
Making a popular set of bike brakes wasn't really the point of the project,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty. 'The project was to find out how to make the wireless connections between two components of a system that has to operate in real time – with milliseconds of difference between success and failure (PDF) – more reliable than systems that are normally connected by a wire.'"
New project: Getting into space by jumping. The purpose isn't to actually get a satellite into orbit, just to find out how to get there by "Jumping Real Hard (tm)".
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Now why do need to have a Battery to have working brakes? On a bike?
on trains at least the brake systems fails to a stop state but any ways on a train why not have a cable any ways you need them to power it and the pipes for the air system.
Cranes, drawbridge motors, and industrial machinery all need power cables and or hydraulic tubes and running cat 6 / other data cables is next to nothing in scale.
I'll stick to my track bike, thank you, which has a single, cable-operated brake that I use for emergency stops two or three times a year.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
It's not a question of not wanting to share the road, it's a matter of being pissed off at idiots who constantly ignore red lights and stop signs, swerve back and forth between lanes (including the oncoming ones), don't signal or even look before turning across in front of traffic, and aren't physically capable of reaching anything approaching the speed limit, despite blocking off the entire road during mid-day traffic. The majority of cyclists should have their bikes taken away from them permanently, for public safety.
If anything, the system should have used optical transmission. It'd be fairly interference- and jam-proof, had they decided to use a modulated transmission -- modulated using a carrier and a PRN code so that multiple bikes in vicinity would not interfere with each other. GPS satellites do transmit at the same frequency, after all, and there's no interference.
Due to small distance between the handlebar and the actuator/receiver, you'd need a fairly powerful laser system to do any sort of large-area jamming, and any small-scale jamming would need tracking -- of course it can be retrofitted to existing, say, tracking camera systems they have on police choppers. Yet, if the transmission was done using two layers of PRN: PRN-driven frequency hopping for the optical subcarrier *and* a digital PRN code, then it could be pretty much jam-proof unless you knew the generator settings. Heck, it the PRN could come from a cryptographically secure generator, where it's "nigh impossible" to know the future code sequence without physically hacking into the box.
I don't think I would want to use any sort of a wireless brake system that uses radio, especially an unlicensed ISM band. It's a fairly preposterous idea. You could trivially swamp the receivers in bikes on a whole block using off-the-shelf radio gear with a concealed antenna. With an optical system, it's line-of-sight. A tinfoil umbrella is all you need to shield it from airborne jamming ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I skimmed the PDF of their report. It's quite interesting, and despite the armchair quaterbacking on Slashdot, these people have done a pretty good job of using a life-critical system for testing out high-reliability wireless connections.
The one issue I have with their work is that they imposed an acceptability limit of 250 ms -- that is, there could be no more than 250 ms lag between a change in command (squeezing more or less hard on the brake handle) and the brake shoes actuating. That seems quite long, even unnecessarily so.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I guess the real reason the article reads like a solid WTF is that they are, supposedly, computer scientists with no experience in RF, controls, or safety-critical system design.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Hybrid would make more sense, with the wireless for performance, and a standard wire as a backup.
This could have been done for decades, it's just that nobody did because it has no advantages over conventional cable brakes and a shit-ton of safety issues.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You do realize that a good portion of your post also describes many automobile drivers out there, right? When looking at the situation, make sure that you're looking at all aspects of it. I don't disagree that there are many inconsiderate cyclists out there. But you also need to acknowledge that there are an equal number of idiot drivers percentage-wise.
I think it would be great to hack these, and then remotely trigger them for laughs.
Yeah, for some things I'll take the old-fashioned mechanical control systems.
-Styopa
I brew my own, proud future eunuch.
("ball cancer"? Where did you get that? The GM big book of medicine?)
I spent four months counting the numbers of automobiles versus bicycles versus those stupid "e-bike" scooters running lights, running stop signs, swerving wildly between lanes, driving on the wrong side of the road mid-lane, running into pedestrians, running into buildings, and generally obstructing traffic, just along my commute to work. Note that there are bicycle lanes along 90% of that route, and only twice in that time did I actually see the bicycles in those lanes.
Want to know the conclusion? Cyclists were approximately ten times as frequently doing those things as automobiles, despite the actual number of cyclists on the road being considerably less. There goes your equal percentage-wise equality - next time you're making statements, maybe you should do some actual research too.
The only reason automobiles running lights beat out the e-bikes is because there were more cars running lights than there were e-bikes in total, of which only three actually stopped at red lights. (Note: e-bikes are heavily advertized in my area as "Lost your license? You don't need one for this!" ...)
Schools and intersections. Real time analysis. Driver backup. Maybe a bridge towards automated vehicles.
the interesting thing is, that I'm ranting for years against my wireless tachometer. It transmits velocity from the wheel and heartrate from the chest wireless. the one connection where wireless is needless - bridging less than a meter where the brake and light cable are anyway and both parts have fixed position always[1] fails. the one where a cable would really disturb me works perfectly.
nice that these people work on "working" wireless while ironically they picked /the/ counterexample for working wireless.
[1] actually it only fails if there are cell-phone stations close or the light is turned on. so if i would leave industrial countries it would work during day time.
Is Toyota manufacturing the parts?
Doesn't mean you should.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/07/shimano?currentPage=1
Yeah, brakes are a different class, since they're a safety requirement rather than a nicety. It's especially nice in shifters, because it takes some of the tedious adjustment out of the picture.
Mostly, I think it's about clean aerodynamic profiles and simplicity: no wires means nothing to adjust. They've had batteries on bikes for a while, so this isn't novel on that score.
It's definitely for high-end road bikes only, real top-of-the-line stuff. I don't know if it will make a difference at that grade or not (it's way out of my league) but it sounds as if the doomsayers don't really know what it is high-end cyclists want and why. Yes, there are issues to be worked out, but I'm pretty sure they're aware of that.
It's not a question of not wanting to share the road, it's a matter of being pissed off at idiots who constantly ignore red lights and stop signs, swerve back and forth between lanes (including the oncoming ones), don't signal or even look before turning across in front of traffic.
Yeah, I hate car drivers too, but there's not much you can do about them, so I just learn to live with it.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Wow, you fail pretty hard at reading comprehension.
I wonder if these guys are building reasonable security into their wireless connections?
Or are they doing what everyone else does, and create a wireless technology
and the security in later.
In addition to having a wireless system that operates reliably, it needs to exclude/ignore unwanted signals (intentional or otherwise). Imagine a bunch sprint in the TdF where a hacker locks everyone's brakes or a bullet train running at 200+kph suddenly locking up.
My wireless bike computer craps out for a quarter mile or so once or twice a ride, every ride. If they can learn something about making wireless connections more reliable, then great, but I'm not holding my breath.
I know someone who bikes a lot (From california to Massachusetts this year.) He has a wireless bike computer, which basically measuses each time your wheel goes around, and sends it wirelessly up to a little display on the handlebars. This worked great till he turned on his LED light, then the link was severed. By repositioning the light he could get the computer to work mostly. But computer isn't a key to functionality as brakes.
I think as a proof of concept this is fun, I would caution against testing at night.............
Bikes are a interesting engineering compromise between "make it state of the art" and "keep it simple/exposed/fixable" engineering. We'll see if hub brakes/ belt chains and other "advances" make a mark..
And they take up the WHOLE LANE with their cars.
but it does not hurt to keep all the other failure modes of mechanical brakes in mind (which may or may not be addressed by this device). These include:
- forgetting to reattach the cable, or deactivate the quick-release after service
- cable separates from soldered end
- binding nut not tight enough
- ice in cable housing makes cable immobile
- wet rims
- iced rims
- melted brake shoes
- melted coaster brake
- broken chain (on a fixie)
- derailed chain (on a fixie)
- brake-worn-rim separation
- internal hub leaks oil onto a disk brake rotor
And you might think, "oh, but this would never happen (to me)", except that most of these things happened to me at one time or another, though never with serious consequences. And I've done some bicycle maintenance/repair sessions with boy scouts and church groups, and my-oh-my-oh-my. The real world is not an orderly place.
Our uneasiness with the idea of wireless brakes has a lot more to do with illusions of control.
That said, bicycle electronics don't get an easy life. The vibration is terrible, and bikes get used in the cold and the wet, and sometimes they get road salt on them.
Optical transmission? How? By line-of-sight? That might work in good weather, for the front brake. But how are you going to get it to the back brake? And what if a drop of water or mud gets on the sending or receiving unit? Optical fiber is still a cable, so that's not a real change, either.
RF could work if more than just channel crosstalk is eliminated as a source of unreliability.
Instead of it being completely wireless, find a way to send the signals through the frame of the bike. Why use air when another conductive medium is available? I realize the experiment was specifically about wireless, but this application seems more suited for the same kind of "wireline" technology that lets you use your home power lines for ethernet.
As a child I often dreamed of a braking system for my skateboard similar to this. I was always too terrified of the big hill in my town to skate it. Now...
..and, maybe I'm simplifying this a bit, but in order to get the signal through reliably you need to yell loud and make sure the receiver is listening. They tried all sorts of stuff which are used in our lan networks, i.e. sending many redundant signals etc., but (if I understand it right) more power and making sure that the receiver is in 'receive' mode works the best/fastest?.
I wonder how this will help the other wireless control systems this research is supposed to help. I imagine in the real world there are more channels and interference issues etc. I we ready for wireless train, crane auto controls yet?
What could possibly go right with this idea?
wait for batteries to run out? no... it will go wrong long before that...
System: "Connection Lost....."
Cyclist: "aaarrggg!!"
Sending and receiving signals. The whole subject has been thought about for more than 50 years. Seems more like an undergraduate learning exercise to me rather than any new discoveries. The summary article dwells on synchronous verses asynchronous. All very obvious to me, nothing new.
There is quite an ingenuous way of getting a small (<10mm^2) optical receiver to be insensitive to droplets of water, splotches of mud, etc. All you do is place it inside a larger dome ;)
The remote for my iPod dock works if you point it anywhere in the same room. It also works very well if you open the door, go to the hallway, and point it almost anywhere in the hallway, as long as you're not too close to the wall. Heck, my desktop lamp, pointed straight at the table, illuminates almost the whole room. How about that!
</sarcasm>
Again, jamming RF is trivial with off-the-shelf components. Jamming optical is not trivial at all.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.