The idea that a bicycle might need an OS might seem silly, but 30 years ago may gearheads wouldn’t have anticipated that cars would become rolling supercomputers.
Hammerhead crowdfunded its first product, the H1, and subsequently built Karoo, a “cycling computer” that supports navigation and training. But Morgan told me his ambitions are bigger than that.
After all, he sees a future where electric bikes need smart range projections, where bike-share fleets need to be managed, where social training programs like Strava can pull data from the bike itself and where any bicycle should come with theft and crash alerts.
Calling it an OS is probably a stretch. It seems to be an Android OS with cycling-specific constellation of apps, originally designed specifically for their own hardware but eventually intended to be licensed to other vendors.
I guess this is what ‘overengineering’ is.
I can see the appeal. At the moment if you want to add a new service e.g. Strava, you have to buy a completely new device or pray for a firmware update that adds it. Having an app store would eliminate that.
That said I’ve used my android mobile phone as a ‘satnav’ on my bike for a long time and it’s really nowhere near good enough compared to a purpose designed device. A number of times i’ve finished a ride to find that it’s not recorded properly etc, so I hope they get the OS absolutely rock solid.
It seems that nowadays it’s enough for one to do a ~fork of Android to be called a new OS…