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Also, I have an Instagram account for the project: Instagram.com/bodaqs.

Some photos from BYB of clean mounting setups!

Seems to be a DAQ box of some kind on this Cannondale? But no sensors visible?

Hey folks, thought I'd share my DIY data acquisition project. It's been about 6 months in the making (so far) and is up and running. My intention, once it's cleaned up and a few more of the wrinkles are worked out, is to open-source this. Hardware-wise, it's based on an ESP32 dev board on a custom PCB that breaks out the connectors and does some simple analog signal processing. It supports 4 analog channels and digital sensors on I2C. It has a small OLED screen and keypad, and optional handlebar-mounted switch for starting and stopping logs and marking events of...

AI isn't amazing at providing insights or recommendations for "novel" things. It's great at historical pattern recognition and replaying patterns into the future. The problem with trying to train an AI model with the tooling we have now is kind of twofold. First, wholistic system data. To recognize patterns that would be meaningful, the model would have to know more than what the position sensors can provide. It would have to take into consideration things like terrain (which you could in theory get from gforce data) but also rider body position and dynamics. It would have to know (from historical...

Here are some of the earliest known data acquisition photos I have seen in mountain biking. These are posted by @vintage mountain bike podcast. An interview they said that Greg Minar was riding this Honda. Very heavy and dangerous to with data on because the covers it would get caught in cross winds. We have come a long way!

Update from the Thinker Garage ;-) The new sensor and calibration are finally implemented. While calibrating the system, I now create a map between rear sensor data (the link arm sensor) and the rear wheel vertical travel (the fishing rod looking sensor). This map is then used while logging to know which sensor value means how much rear wheel travel. Main advantage: No leverage curve needed anymore unless you want to reverse calculate the shock movement. But honestly I haven't seen a use case for that yet in terms of bike setup. Do you guys use raw shock movement data...

Surprised that you don’t see a rotary pot and a link arm being used, far cheaper and more robust. Been using string pots a lot recently as I can’t trust the guys using them to not bash them off. I’d like to back to back them with linear pots to see the response difference.

First prototype of the new rear sensor is on the bike! :-) The sensorarm is waaay too long but I did that on purpose to test different positons for the ballhead.

I like these https://freehub.com/reviews/we-are-one-da-bar

Data system on Factory Honda Supercross bike this weekend in San Diego. I love that rear shock pot mount. They would be using a leverage ratio equation from pot to figure out rear axle movement.

Yeah that's the direction I'd like mtb tyres to go in. MX style tyres which allow you to really lean the bike over. Schwalbe Little Joe with taller knobs would be interesting. https://www.schwalbe.com/en/Little-Joe-11159266

Yeah the system will self-zero itself as long as you top out once during the recording, and if you set the shock stroke as 40mm and wheel travel to whatever your bike is, the software will interpolate a linear relationship between the sensor position and wheel position. So the figures won't be 100% accurate, which means you might want to manually measure the curve between sensor movement and wheel movement, or at least factor that in when interpreting the results. ie if you don't measure the actual curve the average position numbers might show wildly different to an expected number...

This was 3 years ago so my setup was a little more sketchy. This was the first 3d print piece I made. Looks like I went to top tube. Which ever way you mount, the more travel you can give the sensor the less sensitive it will be and could be more accurate

I had a 90 bent ball joint stuck to the front side of the upper link. And a standard ball joint stuck to the underside of the top tube. I took the shock out while mounting and made sure that in the full range of motion, the tracer wasn't getting bent or reaching the limits of the ball joints' swivel. I can't find any pictures, sorry.

I'm aware of that and am usually doing that in Linkagedesign to get proper rear wheel readings for my BYB kit. But if you use sort of "random" points between your rear and front triangle (as pictured above on that crestline), you get (at least in my mind) superfunky sensor displacement that has nothing to do with the shock movement. But I guess you could take the same approach in linkagedsign and use a high-res picture in order to get ~10 points of real wheel travel and corresponding sensor length and interpolate.

When I did it, I flipped the bike upside down, took the wheel out but replaced the rear axle. I tried to set it up so that the tires were level before I removed the wheel (extended seatpost IIRC). I then hooked a ratchet strap to the rear axle to hold it up, at the starting shock stroke position, then removed the shock. Key is figuring out what your zero stroke is, most frames can extend a bit past that. Then I measured vertically axle to floor in 5mm increments, taking corresponding measurements from the sensor stroke. When I plotted...

I've done it a very similar way in the past - I think this was an aluminium bar or timber board attached to the frame parallel to the "ground". I recorded the points then plugged it in to excel and used the fitted trendline to create the leverage curve. Although this was using the Aim system where you could make a custom math channel using that equation directly in the software I've been making progress on a set of tools to help with set up, DAQ and frame measurement - *testing magentic encoders as rotary sensors, and also a tool...

Haha, love the plastic rods label!