BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Forgive the cynicism, but I see this as yet another thing to get busted or stolen, costs far too much, probably made in China, almost certainly will be in a landfill within five years, and which, since I cannot buy it at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, I can get along pretty well without it.

I always feel like this sort of thing has "broken in two weeks" written all over it. Although if it failed while riding you'd be the first on your block to utter the words "hang on guys, I've got to reboot my rear view mirror."

Any idea how much one of these costs?

$349, available summer 2010.

I have to admit, the temptation to try to homebrew a version with a camera module, an accelerometer, and a microcontroller is strong; skip the rear-view and computer functions, just give me video recording on command or on sudden change of velocity.

I'm thinking homemade would be better.

This business of 30 second loops? You can watch what happened for the last half-minute before you stopped focussing on your broken bones and such. Great.

Uh, what if the crash comes from the front or side?

I would think if someone included a device that would alert the rider if something was coming up from behind at an "unsafe" speed, that might be something people would more likely pull out the cash for, an actual preventative.

Front or side? Why, just buy four of them, silly!

Of course, that doesn't catch footage of, say, the 500-pound icicle falling on you...so buy five, just to be 'safe'.

@Dan, maybe you could just rig up some kind of 360 rotating mount on a mast of some kind. It would work with a 'bent pretty well. Get a 16GB flash drive and record some nice panorama shots as you ride.

Six, to get a nice shot of the pothole you fall into before you dissapear, to 311 to the city.

Ooo...good idea! We could hook up an auto-Twitter too...

You could probably do it with two and some nice fish eye lenses like the GoPro.