Subject: RE: Di2? who needs it I think it is an interesting idea to have the brainwaves shift the gears directly, but sort of a gimmick. Once shifting is off the downtube and you don't have to move your hands away from the drops to shift, there is not much more to be gained in performance from shifting manually. I do think an automatic transmission is a better idea. Using the basic existing measurements of inclination of the surface, speed, acceleration, power, and heart rate and a few parameters about the rider like LT and max power, it should be a simple algorithm to optimize the gear the bike should be in. As the article indicates, the Prius-Parlee engineers are thinking about this type of advancement already. If you added some experience from a training runs on the course to the automatic control algorithm, it would be a straightforward application of predictive control to tell the rider his optimum cadence too. You could simply display that optimum cadence versus actual and the rider could simply match his pedal stroke to the optimum. |