Well, for what it's worth, I enjoyed it. It isn't often that retro gets to feel "avant guarde". Ever wonder how that guy felt the first time he showed up for a group ride with a bike that had equal size wheels?

I think that if you tried some clipless pedals, you'd quickly realize that the unclipping comes as second nature after a few rides.

The marketability of e-clipless pedals would not be very good, as serious riders wouldn't be interested because regular clipless pedals work just fine and people new to bicycling would not be interested as the price would be too high.

Best reasoning yet. :thumb:

I would despise pedals that disengaged every time I tapped the brakes. I would probably stop by the side of the road, rip out the wiring, and throw it all into the nearest sewer grate.

I have an excerpt from that day...

"Dearest Frank,

Today I went to join the League of Wheelmen on our regularly scheduled ride around the park and I brought that velocipede that I had shown you on your last visit as I felt that it was ready to be tested and shown to the public. You yourself told me that you thought it was a brilliant idea.

You know how hard I have been working on this and work late after I have finished working in the accounts office, I hope that at some point I will be able to move out of mother's basement and be able to afford my own flat and then we can look forward to having some high times indeed.

The good gentlemen mocked me endlessly about my small wheels and made references to the size of my member and several even commented on my lack of sexual prowess but do not understand how the smaller wheels on my bicycle have anything to do with that, and not that I have any deficiencies in that area. Penelope could attest to that although being the lady that she is, she would never tell what we get up to when mother is not looking.

I will persevere and should say, and with a great deal of pride, with my small wheels I trounced those esteemed gentlemen and when we parted ways they had many questions about my new invention.

I have had some ideas about pedals of late, wondering if fixing one's foot to the pedal would increase the efficiency of the pedal stroke but think that is daft and will get someone killed and bicycling is already such a dangerous sport.

Penelope has expressed an interest in riding my new bicycle but I have reminded her that it would not be proper for a lady to be seen riding a bicycle.

Cordially,

John

P.S. It will be several weeks before the film pictures we took will be developed and you may look at them when you visit us next.

I like it :):)

Hmmm. I'm thinking that in the normal course of things he would have broken his chain or had some other kind of mchanical failure but would have written that he trounced the other riders anyway.

FWIW, Mavic offers a shoe to mate with a pedal with a magnet in it,
that they also make.

This is such a toll I'm tempted to just ignore it. Cycling has a learning curve, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for training wheels or tricycles. Most of us have learned to ride and balance and, as a result, we choose to ride a two wheeler. Some of us also choose to ride with clipless, nobody is making us, rather, just like the skill to balance on two wheels, we have gained the skill to operate clipless pedals. A skill, I might add, that, other than a few initial bumps becomes damn intuitive and is simple to master. If clipless are too hard, then don't ride with clipless. Billions of people ride bikes with platform pedals every day, it's by no means mandatory.

What you're proposing is hugely complicated, not only are you adding an electrical system to a bike that doesn't necessarily have one (tie the brake lever to a brake LIGHT and you might have a little more selling power) but you're proposing a system that not only needs to have the power to release a solenoid strong enough to hold a riders foot in during the most powerful exertion but it has to have electrical contacts across TWO bearing areas which need to maintain 100% electrical contact 100% of the time. Contrast this with a a spring and a motion you don't usually use in the pedal stroke. Sometimes I pedal and brake at the same time, I'd hate to have to worry about switching off the solenoid that releases my feet as I'm slowly turning the cranks over while descending to be in the right gear for the next uphill, then remembering to reactivate it lest I bust my ass in traffic.

Your idea is poor, but what's worse is the backlash from you about getting picked on by the very group you're trying to be a part of by feeling like clipless are somehow mandatory in the first place.

Clipless pedals ARE accessible to everyone just the same way that two wheeled bikes are accessible to everyone, you might have to take your lumps learning, but there's nothing inherently difficult about using them.

I, too, don't really understand the strong negative opinions being expressed. I don't think I'd be interested in a different release system for pedals, but I encourage the OP to see what he can come up with. Who knows what might come of it?

Just to note re the objections:

requires contact across bearings. No, not necessarily
needs to have the power to release a solenoid strong enough to hold a riders foot in Not true. the clip is transverse to the direction of pull
maintain 100% electrical contact 100% of the time This does not follow. Electrical contact might be required for control, but not continuously
worry about switching off the solenoid a mechanical backup should be part of the design
braking without worrying about the release many mechanisms could address this, including most simply a pushbutton near or on the levers.

This is not a bad idea, and it is one which is clearly motivated by a demonstrated need or flaw in current state of the art systems. It may be ultimately unworkable or superfluous.

His pitch sucks. Instead of trying to glean some useful criticism out of some borderline rude comments, he instead chose to ball up and get upset about it instead of bouncing ideas around to hone his vision.


Ok, well then how do you propose to connect the wire from the pedal to the handlebars if it doesn't have to rotate the 360 degrees that the bottom bracket and the pedal travel? Wireless and batteries? WAY TOO heavy. There are already people choosing to ride with inferior and, IMO dangerous, clipless designs in the name of weight. You need some way to get the signal and the power to the pedal across the bottom bracket and the pedal axle.


No, not necessarily.


See what I wrote in response to your first response.


Or I could just skip all this electronic obfuscation (especially if I have to switch it on and off) and learn to ride with a spring based clipless system.

One way to automate this would be to integrate a speed sensor, and possibly speedometer, so it will only release <5MPH, but I feel like that's a step towards a giant wiring harness and something analogous to an ECU in an automobile. But the speedometer solution doesn't address people, like me, conditions depending, who like to unclip their inside foot and take corners with their foot out, supermoto style.


This idea would be a decent add on to the inevitable day when Di2 integrates with a GPS for truly automatic shifting that knows and anticipates upcoming terrain. In the meantime, it's too much infrastructure to add to a bike to solve a problem that the majority of riders who could even afford such a system don't see as a problem.

Do I see an application for a bicycle with Something like Di2, a GPS speedometer/terrain sensor, a dynamo hub with lights (and secondary BRAKE LIGHTS) and something like this as an auxiliary feature? I sure do, but this isn't the way to start towards a unified networked, smart bike.

I think the biggest backlash for me is that I already have too many things to charge that just won't work if I don't keep them charged- my ipods, my ipad, my phone, my laptop... I LIKE that my bike is purely mechanical, I LIKE that I get on it, and it can conquer all different kinds of terrain with nothing but the energy I put into it and maybe a spring to store and release that energy when called upon.

Oh please. My comment was facetious in nature, I wasn't being serious. And I never said that clipless pedals are mandatory at all. I just was devising a system that would allow clipless pedals to be utilized easily without risk by beginners. I never thought my system would be intended for pros or seasoned clipless riders, but mainly by newbies. I know I would be much more apt to try clipless even at my weight if it had a surefire release system. At my current weight, I would never consider clipless due to be worrying about hurting myself if I fell over.

But trolling? I'm the op, I'm not going to troll my own thread. I'm just quite surprised at the flaming I'm taking for it. People could be a lot more cordial and polite when pointing out flaws in a plan.

LOL about me getting into a ball and getting upset. Do you blame me? If you go to a business meeting where people are bouncing ideas off of each other, do others in the meeting act like children and just proclaim "Dumb idea, next!" or whatever? No, people discuss the pros and cons of the ideas in a meeting. That was what I was expecting from this thread and didn't get it.

As for the speed sensor, you can see from my OP, I suggested the same exact thing. The more I think about it, the more I think speed sensing release would be the way to go.

My whole idea was kind of based upon how cars do have ECUs that control some of the safety features in a car. For casual/beginning riders, weight isn't of the utmost concern so adding a half of pound probably won't matter to them. You don't need large solenoid to operate a cam especially in the relaxed pedal stroke. A cam could hold a great deal of strength yet be moved by a tiny solenoid.

So that a person would unclip while climbing a hill? And so that people who stand when they climb will come out of their pedals and injure themselves?

Oh, that sounds really good.

You said it yourself ... you don't ride much. Please ride more, experience more, before coming up with "bright" ideas to fix perceived problems that don't exist.

Here's a suggestion. Since you can't ride much right now because you've broken your leg, and since you're obviously bored, go to the library and get ahold of as many books on cycling as you can. Read about how a bicycle works, and read how cyclists ride.

And this is where the hostility is...

Not hostile as much as trying to get through to him that his short, flat MUP rides aren't the only type of riding people do. Trying to get through to him that what he is proposing is dangerous. Trying to get through to a person who has never used clipless pedals in his life that the problems he thinks exist with them ... don't.


He's coming at this with incorrect assumptions.

1) He says:
"The biggest problem I see is that when people come to a stop, they panic or just aren't able to get their foot to unclip properly."

But as we've already explained, that does happen to people when they first experience clipless pedals, but it is a muscle-memory thing. Once you've retrained your muscle memory a week or two after starting to use the clipless pedals, you're usually good to go.



2) Next he is assuming that people who slow down want to stop and put their foot/feet on the ground.

He says:
"The more I think about it, the more I think speed sensing release would be the way to go."

First of all, the majority of the time that I come to a stop (especially for red lights, stop signs etc.) I leave one foot clipped in. I don't want a mechanism that unclips both feet. And for me, I leave my left foot clipped in. My father, on the other hand, leaves his right foot clipped in. So it would have to be a mechanism that could be set to user preference, allowing users to leave one foot clipped in ... if they wanted.

But sometimes, I want to unclip both feet (my right first, then once I've stoppped, my left) ... especially if I want to get something out of my Carradice.

At the moment, the setup I use allows me to do all of this very well ... no problem at all.

Secondly, cyclists often slow down with no intention of stopping. Climbing hills is one example. I climb steep hills at speeds as low as 4.5 km/h, and I could probably drop it to 4 km/h without tipping over. I have enough to think about, and focus on, when I'm climbing without also having the pressure of keeping my speed up above some limit, or I'm suddenly going to become unclipped.

Sometimes cyclists slow down because a deer, kangaroo, small child, dog, or whatever bounds, hops, or runs out in front of them. The cyclist doesn't want to stop necessarily, the cyclist just wants to slow down suddenly and enough to avoid the situation.

A cyclist might slow way down going through water covering the road ... or on ice ... or through thick snow ... or to take a tight corner on a descent ... or even just approaching a red light from a distance back in the hopes it will change to green before the cyclist gets there so that the cyclist doesn't have to stop.

There's enough to focus on in all these situations without some mechanism suddenly detaching shoes from pedals.


So ... I hope the OP gets a stack of good cycling books from the library and does a lot of reading to find out how cycling really works.

I already mentioned a few ways, but not in any detail. The main thing is, the pedal does not rotate so a wire attached to it wouldn't necessarily need to twist! Only the axle rotates, inside the pedal. As long as the wire isn't attached to the pedal axle, or crank arm or something else that rotates, there's no twist.

As for the continuous connection question, I think something was lost in the back and forth. My only point there is that an electromagnetic clip could be designed with two states - open and closed - and will only need a connection during those brief periods when the state changes.

I have issues unclipping when I reach a certain point of exhaustion on very long rides. I'm not able to reliably generate enough torque in my legs at certain pedal angles to unclip.This so far has not been an issue, but I worry about the first time I'll have to make an emergency stop in this state.

Well, yes.

I'd think that you would want to be able to activate it at any time, so it would need the open/closed signal connection to be available all the time. That's how I read the "100% connected" part.

On one of the local group rides, two or three deer sprinted across the road in front of one of us -- probably about twenty yards ahead of me, but within ten feet of a rider. He stayed upright, but had locked up his rear wheel and fishtailed a bit while trying to slow down. It'd suck if his pedals unclipped for him, especially if it read the speed at the rear wheel and thought that he "stopped".

Why?

Man, I love being a jerk on the interwebs, but this is gonna sound jerky even for me. Here goes, you have 1600 posts in 9 months. Less posting, more riding. Also, there is a small screw that can be loosened with an allen key on your pedals. Loosen it, and you can substantially reduce the (exhausting) amount of movement needed to release your pedals.

I'm thinking of intervals on the order of a few hundredths to say a tenth of a second. Spec'ing it 100% connection 100% of the time is for when a brief interruption is problematic. All you need is for a control signal to be available briefly during reasonably small intervals. I don't agree that this poses a significant engineering problem.

Because you, and only you, can decide how you react to any given situation.

Stop trying to blame someone else for your actions.