ibike - part 4 - the software install

Well the software looked good enough sitting on the CD-ROM, and it seemed to install on my PC OK - and I followed the instructions - but it failed to find the USB driver first up. I followed the instructions again, went through the whole install and once again it failed to find the driver. So I went manual in control panel and found the driver had indeed installed correctly on my hard drive, it's just that the "automatic, preferred" search doesn't look there... of course. Wonder if this happens to everyone? Anyway, it really does extract and copy it to your ibike program folder, so a bit of searching will find it. It's just a manual approach is needed when 'auto' fails. Once loaded it all worked.

The software is simple. Connect, download all or some files... ooops, it crashed. And the ibike itself froze. OK, this has only happened once, but again I followed instructions, restarted the software and took the battery out of the ibike. I popped the battery back in and it fired up again and has worked flawlessly since. In fact it works better now than before. The battery started life reading 2.80V and fell to 2.70V during the 2nd ride, before recovering to 2.78V. However after refitting (and perhaps putting the cover back on a bit tighter?) it reads 2.82V pre-ride and hasn't fallen below 2.77V. The instructions say to get a new battery if it falls below 2.75V before a ride. Perhaps my first-day glitches were battery related?

Anyway, back to the software. It's good enough. It loads up the whole ride as a .CSV file and you can 'play' with power, wind speed, elevation, slope and bike speed for starters. You basically can graph it as you like it, including looking at neat breakdowns of acceleration, hill and friction readings at any point in the ride. And you can probably read and modify it in any spreadsheet, too, given that it's saved as a .CSV (but I haven't tried - yet). It's simple, but does the job for a data junkie like me. It's strange though that the ibike itself displays slightly different maximum values than that logged in the data file. That aside, overall it's what I expected.