Computer scientists at Germany's Saarland University have worked long and hard to rid your bike of that pesky one foot of brake cable which used to curve, short and graceful, down to the front wheel. Instead of a simple system of super-reliable levers and cables, the Saarland team uses a wireless transmitter to brake the bike.
The wireless brake consists of a transmitting hand grip and a motorized disk-brake caliper. Squeeze the grip and the brakes are actuated according to a radio signal. Squeeze harder and you brake harder -- as long as your batteries are charged. Just watch out for pranksters with RF transmitters who trigger your brakes from afar.
The Saarland team's work isn't intended to actually be used on bikes. Instead it is an experiment to see if wireless brakes can ever be made safe enough for use in trains, planes and automobiles. If you're testing things out, obviously a slow-moving bike is a safer environment than a landing airliner.
The boffins have managed to get reliability up to a rather decent 99.999999999997 percent, which is a lot better than the reliability of an urban hipster on a brakeless fixed gear bike with a loose-fitting (and skip-happy) chain. This is in part achieved by redundancy: several transmitters send duplicate signals, but even this was found to fail if configured incorrectly.
The system is still far from perfect, but the use of brake-by-wire tech could incorporate anti-lock tech, which could prevent disastrous front-wheel skids in the wet, for example.
I'll be sticking with cables for the foreseeable future. The last thing I want is to be forced to walk home because I forgot to charge my brakes.
Reaching 99.999999999997 percent safety: Saarland computer scientists present their concept for a wireless bicycle brake [Alpha Galileo via Gizmag]
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