Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
I think the devices either put out a steady amount of power, or stop putting out power altogether. That's part of the point of the converter.
You know generators produce more power at higher speeds. It doesn't make sense thowing available power away by capping.
They maintain constant voltage actually. And turning stuff on and off repeatedly tends to increase the rate of failure. Put that risk in something that is cheap and easy to replace (a cache battery).
USB charging has fairly narrow voltage requirements (but looser amperage requirements).
Look at Unterhausen's story about how annoying it was to have his Garmin being directly attached. That would have been completely eliminiated if he was using a cache battery.
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
A cache battery works in some situations but not others. Eventually it needs to be recharged itself, and sometimes that's not possible.
??? You charge the cache battery with the generator. You might be able to do away with the generator entirely with a just a much-cheaper cache battery.
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
Other times it's just a lot easier to run a wire from the front hub up to a phone on the bars, than it is to try to figure out how to mount an extra cache battery there.
You are exaggerating the difficulty here. If you are riding long distances at night, you may need to use a cache battery anyway. During the day, it's possible that you can generate more power than your phone uses (a cache battery lets you capture that power).