With the upcoming release of the next generation InfoCrank, the team at Verve have been reflecting on our journey and what drives us. Founder and CEO Bryan Taylor shares his thoughts on why truly accurate data is more important than you think and what makes InfoCrank different from other power meters.
Here we are again, about to release the new InfoCrank and the issue of true accuracy raises its head again. In our early days, we had no idea why this was even a consideration – surely having the correct number was of considerable value to anyone who wanted to improve performance and to anyone who wanted to work with the numbers?
We were surprised that what we found instead is that a large number of people were quite satisfied with a number that sort of made sense – as long as it was a number.
We never built the original InfoCrank to be the most accurate power meter. The aim was to build a device that was easy to operate and did not have all the shortcomings of the products available at that time. We thought accuracy was a given!
Until the InfoCrank was actually produced, I assumed that the two products I had used in the previous 10 years were accurate as the manufacturer told me. I knew no better at the time.
As a competitive cyclist, there were several issues that really affected me when it came to the two products that were prominent back then:
- Water proofing.
- Temperature differences producing varying results even during one ride.
- The need to calibrate or zero before riding each day.
- The drift in numbers during virtually any ride of length.
- The inability to determine leg balance or visualise the pedal stroke.
When I spoke to the head of a major national institute, it was clear that they wanted all the above problems fixed and they wanted genuine, everyday accuracy and they believed that InfoCrank could deliver it all.
I have to say the waterproofing was the hardest of them all, but after a couple of years we got that pretty right. Why did our partners believe the InfoCrank would deliver the rest of the requirement including accuracy?
They recognised that we went back to engineering basics to build the InfoCrank. We essentially built a ‘torque transducer’ paired with mechanisms so that we knew the crank speed at all times. If you can measure both of those values perfectly each time (in our case 256 times each second or approximately every 4 milliseconds) then your watts number will be at an unapparelled level of accuracy.
This is the secret.
The good news is that the next generation InfoCrank – the IC2 – is a major upgrade on the ground-breaking (and still supported) original InfoCrank. It is the pinnacle of a cyclist’s measurement tools and the only power meter you’ll ever need.
