If you’re sick of IT but still crave a hobby that involves hundreds of arcane parts each claiming to offer a tiny-but-allegedly-critical performance advantage, drop into your nearest bicycle store.
There you’ll find folks who think nothing of dropping a couple of hundred bucks on a carbon fibre seat post whose particular geometry can supposedly transfer extra power from your legs to the road, while also shaving the weight of a bike by critical a few grams.
Things can get pretty weird: after a while overclocking geeks’ arguments about which thermal grease delivers the best performance can start to seem almost normal.
If you get hooked (and cycling is very addictive) but end up pining for PCs as well, the Cerevellum may give you the crossover experience you crave. The device is a handlebar-mounted bike computer on steroids, with a 3.5 in, 320x240 screen and a memory card slot. There are also four USB ports so you can connect other gadgets to the base Cervellum unit, an inclusion we think justifies dubbing it the world’s first hub for “Bicycle Area Networks” (BANs).
One of the promised USB modules is a camera to be mounted in either the handlebars or seat post of a bike, which will display its video to a rider on the Cerevellum’s screen so that riders can see cars coming up behind them, a lovely safety feature that has online biking forums more than interested.
GPS mapping is another promised module and power meters (serious cyclists eschew km/h in favour of measuring the watts a rider generates) are also on the agenda. The device is even touted as capable of taking over gear-shifting chores on bikes, thanks to a new generation of electrically powered drive trains. Riders would tap on the Cerevellum’s screen or buttons instead of messing about with levers and knobs as they do today.
Cervellum’s inventors are looking for someone to manufacturer the machine, which they hope will be available in a year or two for $US299 and expect will clean up thanks to its BAN architecture making the device far more future proof than the standalone bike computers that dominate today’s computer/bike gadget market.
We hate to be cynical, but inventors guesses on the cost of devices are often wildly wrong, if the Optimus Maximus keyboard by Art Lebedev is any indication. That was initially mooted as costing "less than a mobile phone" but ended up costing $US1564.
There you’ll find folks who think nothing of dropping a couple of hundred bucks on a carbon fibre seat post whose particular geometry can supposedly transfer extra power from your legs to the road, while also shaving the weight of a bike by critical a few grams.
Things can get pretty weird: after a while overclocking geeks’ arguments about which thermal grease delivers the best performance can start to seem almost normal.
If you get hooked (and cycling is very addictive) but end up pining for PCs as well, the Cerevellum may give you the crossover experience you crave. The device is a handlebar-mounted bike computer on steroids, with a 3.5 in, 320x240 screen and a memory card slot. There are also four USB ports so you can connect other gadgets to the base Cervellum unit, an inclusion we think justifies dubbing it the world’s first hub for “Bicycle Area Networks” (BANs).
One of the promised USB modules is a camera to be mounted in either the handlebars or seat post of a bike, which will display its video to a rider on the Cerevellum’s screen so that riders can see cars coming up behind them, a lovely safety feature that has online biking forums more than interested.
GPS mapping is another promised module and power meters (serious cyclists eschew km/h in favour of measuring the watts a rider generates) are also on the agenda. The device is even touted as capable of taking over gear-shifting chores on bikes, thanks to a new generation of electrically powered drive trains. Riders would tap on the Cerevellum’s screen or buttons instead of messing about with levers and knobs as they do today.
Cervellum’s inventors are looking for someone to manufacturer the machine, which they hope will be available in a year or two for $US299 and expect will clean up thanks to its BAN architecture making the device far more future proof than the standalone bike computers that dominate today’s computer/bike gadget market.
We hate to be cynical, but inventors guesses on the cost of devices are often wildly wrong, if the Optimus Maximus keyboard by Art Lebedev is any indication. That was initially mooted as costing "less than a mobile phone" but ended up costing $US1564.
