I can barely make calls on my 5-year old cell phone and know little about the new smart phones. But my friend gets a new one twice a year and was showing me a really cool application for his latest Droid-thing that he downloaded for $5. It is an application that turns your phone into a dyno for any vehicle that you are riding. I guess it might even work for a bicycle and would appear to be just the thing for an electric motorcycle.
After downloading this application, it uses your phone's GPS function to provide all sorts of information about your bike's performance. You have to enter a bunch of information about your ride into the system, such as weight of the vehicle and its load (like the rider) and other bits of stuff to get the most accurate results. Then you just accelerate as hard as you can on level ground on a day with no wind and your phone will tell you how fast and how quickly you traveled over the one eighth and the quarter mile, along with your top speed. It will tell you how much power and torque your engine makes and provides a power and torque curve, along with a lot of other information that boggled my mind. He tried it on his Yamaha RD60 and achieved a top speed of 43 mph, something like 38 seconds over the quarter mile and the bike made 3 HP (it was a good day).
Anyway, it all looks really cool and certainly is cheap enough. A lot cheaper than paying for a dyno run and I can imagine how useful this application would be for the members of the Electric Motorcycle Forum. Unfortunately, I can't recall the name or manufacturer of the product. But I'll bet someone here will be able to track it down and provide more specifics than I can about this application. It looks like a lot of fun to me.
