About OpenStreetMap & friends

I am just return­ing from the Euro­bike in Friedrichshafen, the major fair for bicycles.

On the one hand, I am fas­ci­nated by the boom of e-bikes - includ­ing all the "elec­tronic tun­ing" oppor­tu­ni­ties. On the other hand, I am deeply dis­ap­pointed by the motor, bat­tery and con­troller com­bi­na­tions that form a com­pletely pro­pri­etary system.

Imag­ine you wish to go to work by bike but do not want to increase your heart beat above 140bpm to avoid sweat­ing. The  e-motor sup­ports you as soon as go close to the set thresh­old. With the e-bike you could do imple­ment "chip-tuning" to increase the max­i­mum speed as seen in cars. You could down­load a route with the alti­tude pro­file and see if cur­rent bat­tery power will be suf­fi­cient to take you to the des­ti­na­tion (here lies the link to OSM).

E-bikes are still at an early stage but sales fig­ures are steadily grow­ing and the typ­i­cal early stage prob­lems seem to get sorted. The acu­a­tion unit - includ­ing the elec­tronic con­troller - comes from a hand­ful of providers, with Pana­sonic as the mar­ket leader. Bosch informed me that they are not plan­ning to pro­vide any access - not even read-only - to their sys­tem. If you are fac­ing a prob­lem you have to go an autho­rized dealer who has a diag­nos­tic unit to read out the mem­ory of the con­troller - the same closed world as we know it from the auto­mo­tive industry.

Wouldn't it be cool if the firmware of the elec­tronic con­troller could be replaced with an Open Source firmware? The same way as I can replace the some of the WLAN-Router firmware with Open Source solu­tions like Open­WRT or Tomato. Then you could link your smart­phone to your e-bike and access all the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion or tune it through apps.

I would be will­ing to orga­nize a hack-day or sup­port (finan­cially) ini­tia­tives if any­body comes up with some good ideas to 'hijack' one or the other e-bike con­troller so that a smart­phone con­nec­tion can be estab­lished. Let me know what you think!

{ 5 comments }