Hacker News Reader

Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know if this would affect bicycles as well?

I have a phone mount on my roadbike handlecars - one of the Quadlock ones - does anybody know if the road vibrations from cycling can cause as much damage as the motorbike?

If anything...I would have thought a fairly stiff road bike would have more vibrations than a motorbike?

View on HN

I don’t know about iPhones, but bicycle tourers who ride long stretches of washboard or rough singletrack have frequently complained that the vibrations broke their autofocus lens on an ordinary DSLR or mirrorless camera. And that is not even with the camera mounted, but rather tucked away in a handlebar bag.

My uneducated guess is that it's not the strength of the vibration that does it.

It's the fact that a motorcycle will vibrate at a specific frequency for tens of minutes or hours at a time while driving.

On a bicycle it's more random and not uniform, unless you drive on a completely uniformly covered gravel road for an hour at a constant speed =)

Pretty common complaint in reviews for bike mounts when I was researching was breaking autofocus mechanism and IIRC either gyro or accelerometer which messed up screen orientation. Seemed like it happens in city riding as well but might depend on road quality of city.

A friend of mine told me that the microphone on two different Fairphones broke from mounting them on their rather high-end mountain bike's handlebar (he realized it must be the handlebar after the second breakage.)

It happened with my iPhone X on a racing bike. I mounted it with sp-connect on the bike stem. After 2 years (about 8000 kilometers), the camera was completely shaky.

I'm sure if you're doing downhill gravel riding, the phone will shake more than with a motorcycle riding on the street.

Surely the frequency of the vibration matters too? I would suspect that motorcycles will be closer to the resonant frequency of the springs. I don't pretend to understand enough to say with confidence though.

several years ago my iPhone 8 focus was broken after like 10K KM of riding.

I'm assuming not, since the article in the post specifically mentions high-powered engines found in motorcycles—unless you're competing in the Tour de France, you should be fine.

The article says "high power motorcycle engines" but I've heard of this happening on pretty low power motors as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com