I just returned a cyplus m2. I had to hit a "start" button for it to track mileage, neither the trip or odometer worked without

I want an auto start computer that tracks speed/odo/ and possibly trip, WITHOUT having to push buttons to "record" my trip.

If I have to I'll use a wheel sensor but I would prefer gps speed tracking.

does such a computater exist?

Some model of Garmin would $uit you best. They make some small ones.
Personally, I simply mount (Quad Lock) my iPhone to my stem and use Strava. Rarely a hiccup over a ten-year span.

Thanks,

I'm not a garmin fan, they do too much for too much $$$$

Strava is an app? I'll look it up.

so far some apps I have tried suffer from the same problems of "recording"

I'm tempted to just find a 90's cateye since that will do what I want....

I like my iPhone screen on over my entire rides, so I hung a small battery pack of the handlebar.
Strava does a nice auto-stop & start, but, of course, one needs to hit the start button when you push off.
Many people forget to hit the stop button at ride's end, pile their bike in the vehicle, and drive off.
Easy to crop out the excess, but many wait until somebody flags their 40mph avg ride!

I downloaded strava and already don't like it.

How hard is it to press Start ?. You typically need to press Stop after a completed ride, else it sometimes records the car ride home.

some peoples bikes don't ride in cars

Years ago all bike computers were wired and to a wheel sensor, magnet on a spoke. Most or maybe all of them would auto start.

I have a wired one on my rando bike, it auto starts, but that one was made by a company that went out of business years ago, no longer sold.

Does anybody still make wired bike computers?

You still woild want to stop a ride, so you can turn off the device. Unless you power down and it starts recording again on the same activity the next time you power up.

Pretty much any Garmin Edge as well as Hammerheads Karoo or a Wahoo has a setting to auto start a track, you usually configure for a particular speed to have it start.

Don't be afraid of bike computers that do all that nifty stuff. You don't have to use any of it. All of them do the basic stuff very well. One thing Garmin has going for it is that all the Garmin devices I've owned in my lifetime still work. About 20 of them all together. With the exception of a Marine Chart plotter that spent two weeks underwater after my boat sunk in Hurricane Katrina. It got a little bit of water in it. Even so, it continued to work for 2 years after we got the boat off the bottom and cleaned everything up.

Just decide how much you wish to spend on a bike computer.

Yes. The CatEye Quick will do what you want.

https://www.cateye.com/intl/products...ers/CC-RS100W/

• General Features:
• understandable pictogram
• automatic start/stop
• capture mode can be turned off/on

• Bicycle features
• current speed
• daily kilometers
• total kilometers

• Time function:
• time
• driving time
  
  

I can’t think of one bike computer that starts without hitting a button. Plenty of them have the auto start/stop feature, but it is after you press Start, of else there would be a perpetual drain on the battery, killing it much sooner.

My wired computer that is over 10 years old will run for years on one CR2032 coin type battery. Auto starts when the wheel sensor picks up the magnet that goes past.

They used to all be made this way. Mine is a Sports Instruments SI90, but that company went out of business over a decade ago. I used to have a couple Trek ones that did the same thing, but the Trek ones used a thinner wire that would snag and break. The Sports Instruments ones used better wire.

Cat Eye alone has 13 of them. I have a Knog unit that does, however it was disco’d a few years back. As someone noted above, it’s how all the computers ised to work before GPS; I can’t think of one with GPS that auto starts/stops.

lol

Just use a small odometer without any GPS. Those odometers do auto start/pause, show your speed, mileage, trip km and total km, time you ride and are easy to install and configure (tire size) and as an extra indicates the time of the day and turn off automatically.

awesome thanks for the heads up. I’ll be checking out the cateye quick and the sigma.

I was on the cateye site and it was not very user friendly.

@dennis what specifically are you using?

I don’t need to be able to download info to the instagrams for likes, I just want to be able to look and see I did x amount of miles per week/month/year and plan oil changes… and McDonald’s drive thru visits..

I think if I still had some of my 20+ year old cateyes they would still have some battery power left.

Pretty sure all the Garmin Edge units have auto start. You can set a specific speed at which it will start to record a track.

Edge 1050 Bike Computer Owner's Manual - Starting the Timer Automatically

it sounds like I have to push a button three times to auto start a timer

Twice. Once to power the device on, second to start the track recording, unless you enable Auto-Start, in which case you only need to turn on .power. If setup correctly, the device can automatically start recording your ride at whatever speed you tell it to recognize.

FWIW and judging by your tone in the posts, it sounds like you are searching for reasons to not like the GPS type units and that's all fine, a simpler Cateye or Sigma unit might give you less to complain about.

I think the effort the OP has put into this thread exceeds the effort he would make pushing a start button on every ride for the next 50 years.

They do. I own one. Think the OP was referring to not having to ever Start the unit - just ride and it records. Don’t have to push that pesky button.

I think on even the basic old style, magnet on the wheel units, you still need to press a button to wake it up. You do need to stop them so as to stop recording, you then need to press something to clear the old ride numbers.