Get your knee down? Collecting Data for Lean Angle

The EatSleepRIDE Motorcycles App for iPhone is now available in the US and Canada iTunes stores! More countries will be added soon.

This comprehensive App is specifically designed for motorcycle riders. It enhances the motorcycle experience by allowign the rider to record their ride, including speed, elevation and lean angle. CRASHLIGHT automatically detects a motorcycle accident and notifies pre-set contacts of the rider's exact geographical location via voice, email and SMS. Here's more info on what the EatSleepRIDE mobile app can do http://app.EatSleepRIDE.com

How Does Lean Angle Work?

One of the features implemented in the mobile App is the ability to track your lean angle while riding.

The lean angle is the angle you achieve when you take a turn on your bike. The lean is measured by calculating the change from being upright to your current lean position around a corner. For those of you who race or wonder how well you took any corner, the lean angle calculation gives you the direct measurement with correlation to your speed plotted on a map.

How is lean angle calculated?

Our approach is affected by a few factors but not as many as traditional solutions. The majority of traditional solutions involve connecting hardware and that has a few inherent problems. Hardware is affected by the road conditions (hills, dips, pot holes).

Hardware can also cause the centripetal force (the force which keeps a body moving with a uniform speed along a circular path) to cancel out acceleration data. Calculating seemingly simple data is made complicated when using hardware. For example, finding the center of gravity is affected by height of the hardware device from the ground. How the rider's own center of gravity lines up with the bike is affected by the hardware and so is the weight distribution change from one ride to another.

Lean Angle Calculation for iPhone

The way we've overcome these problems is to implement multiple sensors in tandem to reduce the effect of unwanted "noise" or data.

The lean angle is calculated using software, without any external hardware. The EatSleepRIDE Motorcycles mobile appemploysthe sensors from your phone to calculate the position of your device while you're riding, we use the change in position of the phone to find your lean around a corner.

EatSleepRIDE!