Helios Bars: The arrival of the smart bike | Hacker News Reader

Helios Bars: The arrival of the smart bike

humansinvent.com

24 pointsleonardRenter17 comments

These people don't seem to be very pragmatic or legal cyclists:

> 0-5mph is red, 5-10 is yellow, 10-15 is green

Everyone should know that red is the only acceptable color for rear-facing bike lights. Green is absurd. Green tells cars to GO.

I don't need my rear lights to be "smart." I just need them to be as bright as possible. And yes, red.

Very good point. If am not mistaken in Denmark you have to have standard white light in front and and red on back. They also must be light enough.

haha yeah very confusing for drivers. As if they need another reason to mow down a cyclist.

Also apparently I'm supposed to stare at the ends of my handle bars for directions?

It feels like both speedo functionality and gps directions should be rolled into a third group of lights on the top of the cross bar.

This is a non-solution to a non-problem, invented by a non-cyclist.

The first and most obvious issue is that it isn't an effective anti-theft solution. Professional bicycle thieves use vans and target components as well as whole bikes. It takes them about fifteen seconds to remove a set of handlebars - today they do this to quickly steal the STI brake/gear levers (which are often worth several hundred dollars). A GPS tracker would only be effective if it was hidden or permanently attached to the frame.

The line "Imagine gauging your speed without having to read a display or pull out your phone!" seems farcical, given that handlebar-mounted bicycle speedometers have been around for decades and cost less than $20.

Using non-red rear lights is illegal in most jurisdictions and not wise anywhere.

The stated battery life is just seven hours.

Perhaps most grievously, the handlebar-stem assembly is completely non-adjustable and one-size-fits-none. Existing handlebars with an integrated stem are marketed solely for racing, but are available in many different sizes. To cover the entire range of road bikes, you'd need thirty or forty different sizes.

There is also a Chicago startup that has come up with a solution: http://bikespike.com/. They just finished a successful Kickstarter of 150k+

The nice thing about Helios's GPS is that it's built into the handlebars, whereas BikeSpike mounts externally, making it much easier from a thief to destroy before stealing the bike.

I wonder what technology these use. There's an older stem mounted GPS from a UK company that uses a 2G network, which makes me skeptical about it's useful life. Bikes last for decades, but 2G networks will be replaced much sooner.

Similar technology is available for several years now. Here are some local guys used it to actively catch bike thieves and made a video series about how it worked out in practice. Here's the episode detailing how they recovered a stolen bike in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obqEJVsWq8o

There's a GPS devices welded to the bike frame? Congratulations, you'll get the bike frame back.

Bike tires are the most frequently stolen part by thieves who won't bother with the whole bike.

Wait, how do you find out location after the bike was stolen? GSM?

You put a pay-as-you-go SIM card in it, and you can text it and it'll text its coordinates back.

That suggests, though, if anyone knows your bike's number they could track it everywhere. I'm not sure I'd want that feature.

Can somebody point me to similar low cost, low power GSM modules?

How do you brake?…

You need to add normal road bike style brakes and bar tape. Same goes for shifting.

The smart bike that can be tracked even if it's stolen.

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