Jay tipped me off to this amazing, at least from a geek point of view new bike bit. A new company, Quark, has applied open source, and open standards to bike equipment, specifically power meters, GPS, heart rate monitors, and cyclometers.
Quark has a crank spider that can replace the spider on many cranksets, including FSA, TruVativ, Cannondale, Rotor, and they're working on others. In the spider is a all the bits for power measurement, as well as a temperature range compensation mechanism to help deal with adjustments in measurement (I'm presuming for other things, unless that affects power measurement). It also has the new Ant +Four transmitter system. As they describe in the above video, this is "like bluetooth for bicycles." It's a new standard from Garmin, and is intended to be just like Bluetooth to transmit data between heart rate monitors, GPS, power meters, cyclometers, and so on. Very cool.
Now, going further, they have a head unit, aka the cyclometer/computer part, that is pretty sick. It can be mounted portrait/veritcal or landscape/horizontal, has a nice big color screen, and does everything: GPS, power meter, usual cyclometer stuff, etc. But, the even crazier catch? It's Linux based, and completely open source! Ok, this is getting into the geeky part for sure, but what is so great about this is that it means anyone who wants can hack on it. They said there is an XML file that controls the layout of the display and what info is there, and more. Presumably given it's Linux and open source, you could go really wild with this, and completely modify the software. My hat is off to them, as this is really a big step forward in this part of the industry. So, even though most people wouldn't be hacking on it themselves, what you may find is that a whole cottage industry of mods will be available, allowing you to just download some new software or a new file, etc. and it will change the appearance or functionality of your unit. Good stuff.
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