24 March 2010
Wireless
(Cateye wireless multi-function Speedometer)
I had to speed home from the office since my older son was coming over for dinner. It was a near thing- there was some discretionary time between food prep and dinner, so I could have exercised. That is one half of the complete resolution to get fit and eat less (and better), but it was raw and gray outside and on the verge of wet in Arlington.
Nothing obsessive, I have resolved for this pendulum swing of my life, and then of course I began to obsess with dinner.
A further distraction was sitting on the dining table. A package from Amazon had arrived in the mail, and it was beckoning from the living room as I bustled around the kitchen, still in my working-clown costume.
My son was coming for dinner, a weekly ritual that provides him at least one home-cooked meal (I assume his mother contributes another) and with the left-overs I send away with him, provides a cushion against the cruel fate of the bachelor kitchen.
First things first. I did some sauté spinach, red-potato mash and roasted garlic chicken. That was all done and there was barely enough time to get out and try to break a sweat.
Or I could open the package.
This has been a good week for the mail. Monday featured the arrival of that gigantic and unsettling panorama of female subjugation to an implacable and lascivious patriarchy. This one, by way of contrast, was small and light.
I suspected it contained the multi-function speedometer for the new bike that I had ordered on-line over the weekend. I am trying to avoid the upscale bike shop for the moment, since my last encounter with the True Believer at the cash register.
I am still a little leery of the whole thing. The bike is very cool, but the tire is so narrow and the thing is so fast that I am certain there is a crash in store somewhere. Still, it is the easiest thing on the knees, and that is a compelling aspect to exercise.
“No pain, no gain,” I used to think, but pain is bad, particularly if it is bone grinding against bone.
The Speedometer is useful for more than that. For navigation, it is important to know how far you have peddled, and for fitness, how fast you have done it. The higher-end models have other wireless links that can connect to a sensor on your chest or wrist and display heartbeat and caloric expenditure.
When I opened the package I was startled by how small all the components were. The little computer is about the size of a man's watch, with a three-quarter-inch LED display.
It is a technical marvel. I am rooted in the old school, when instrumentation like that would have required a cable connected to a sprocket. Remember the old bike lights?
There actually was a little generator that was affixed to a bracket that swung the rotating top in contact with the rear tire and produced enough current to shine the light fixed to the handlebars.
(Schwinn Mechanical Speedometer)
It is very industrial age in the approach, and sort of Steam Punk, which I like.
None of the current cultists would put up with that added drag, so technology has moved on.
This device is wireless, completely. There is a tiny magnet that mounts to one of the spokes on the front wheel and is measured by a sensor that is affixed to the front fork. That, in turn, communicates with the little display screen that is mounted on the handlebar. 5 centimeters and 70, respectively, are the limits of the wireless range, so it is pretty sensitive.
The majority of that time, of course, was not the installation but figuring out how to set the basic parameters of the device. For accuracy, the wheel diameter is critical, so I had to divine what that was and convert inches to centimeters and enter the data, set the clock (24-hour or am-pm) and enter the time.
It took me enough time to fiddle with the tiny buttons that my son arrived just as I was sliding it into the little bracket on the handlebars.
Well, plenty of time to see if it works.
It occurs to me that the old set ways would work whether there were batteries or not. If distribution is ever interrupted in some disaster, natural or man-made, we would slide rapidly back to the pre-industrial world without a stop in the age of mechanical things.
Our little wireless devices, phones, speedos, watches and stuff would blink and go blank as their batteries failed. At least the bike would still work, which would be more than anything else.
The bike has a lot more going for it than just being an exercise device. It could also be a means to get down to the farm, with eight full-functioning wireless displays all the way.
That beats the roller-blades all to hell.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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