Cycling geek tidbits...

As many of you know I'm a bit of a bike geek. Not in the sense that I need to have the newest equipment, but in the way that I get excited in advances in technology. Since getting my powertap a few years ago, I've been pretty interested in the advances in power measuring technology. While traveling down that road I came across a neat open source software project called Golden Cheetah. It grew out of the need for a better analysis program for the mac and linux.

I got involved with the project by helping with testing and debugging as my coding skills are not really up to snuff, and it has been a pretty fun journey. In any case the project has grown a lot over the past few years, and it in now running on mac, linux, and windows (as well as a few other *nix type systems). This cross platform compatibility is the key to an exciting new project/device that is being developed by Quarq: The Qollector. It is a data logger that will record data from any ANT+ device (speed, power, heartrate). It is essentially a USB stick on steroids, and you can plug it into your computer to download the data. The coolest things is that it has a lot of storage (4 GB) and you can actually run golden Cheetah directly from the usb stick. away at a race and don't have you computer but want to looks at some data, no problem, find a computer, plug your collector in and you are good to go.

Here is a short video showing a little more info on it.


Congrats to all of the developers and the folks at Quarq for having the vision to put this all together.