Extended battery life in a Mountain Bike

[horacio_emilio]

I have a tomtom one v2. I would like to use it with my mountain bike for long rides, around 10 hours. Battery lasts 3 or so hours. So I wonder what could I do here.

1- Are there any kind of external batteries that can be coupled with the GPS device?

2- Are there around mountain bike charges that provide charge via USB?

Thanks

 

[Andy_P]

1. Try a Google search for "External battery USB" - you'll get loads of results.

You haven't put your location in your profile so I don't know whether you want dollar prices, but here's one which would do the job fine (first on the list of the Google search results I got).

2. Do you mean a device that converts your pedalling energy into a 5Volt USB output?

 

[Aiken Drum]

A bike charger would work best, 10-hours is a long time.
Take a look at this, kind of pricey.

Bicycle Charger for iPod iPhone Cellphone and Other Devices

I have a 4-AA battery pack with USB port for the TT and it only gives an additional 3-hours runtime, would have thought more but that is real world. Here is a similar one to what I have

Amazon.com: Tekkeon TekCharge Mobile Power and Battery Charger: Cell Phones & Accessories

I also found my charger lasts longest when I plug it in to a fully charged TT. All batteries deplete at the same rate that way, if you wait until the TT is discharged then the external pack tries to provide to the TT and the battery at the same time, seems to use it up faster. Don't know why.

WELCOME TO THE FORUM!

 

[horacio_emilio]

yes! this is the kind of thing I was looking for!

I just wonder if there any of them that are magnetic, I mean frictionless between the device and the tyre

A bike charger would work best, 10-hours is a long time.
Take a look at this, kind of pricey.

Bicycle Charger for iPod iPhone Cellphone and Other Devices

I have a 4-AA battery pack with USB port for the TT and it only gives an additional 3-hours runtime, would have thought more but that is real world. Here is a similar one to what I have

Amazon.com: Tekkeon TekCharge Mobile Power and Battery Charger: Cell Phones & Accessories

I also found my charger lasts longest when I plug it in to a fully charged TT. All batteries deplete at the same rate that way, if you wait until the TT is discharged then the external pack tries to provide to the TT and the battery at the same time, seems to use it up faster. Don't know why.

WELCOME TO THE FORUM!

 

[Andy_P]

I just wonder if there any of them that are magnetic, I mean frictionless between the device and the tyre

Veering slightly off-topic but it depends what you mean by "frictionless". You will still have extra resistance to your pedalling with a magnetic system.
"You don't get something for nothing"

 

[canderson]

I gave a lot of thought to trying to play with my old 720 this way, but gave up on the idea pretty quickly. Lots of downsides:

1) The TomTom screen is OK, but not all that great when it comes to reflected glare. Not easy to use outdoors in the sun vs. in the car.

2) Coming up with a mount for the TomTom was problematic. Even the 3rd party mounts left me with some peculiar Rube Goldberg lash-up on the handlebars, all of which wasn't solid enough to avoid a lot of vibration which made the unit nearly impossible to read while riding.

3) My TomTom didn't really appreciate going off-road (we're talking a mountain bike here, right?) since it wants to snap to a road all the time, and TomTom doesn't produce trail maps for their units.

4) The battery life wasn't cutting it at all. Because of the glare issue, I found myself with the backlight turned up fairly high, and could only get about 1-1/2 hours use.

5) I had to load 3rd party software to get useful information. Very few TomTom models will produce a track log without adding 3rd party software. I was able to come up with a couple of packages from Le Web B@zar !!! Roadbooks, Liens, Calendrier, Essais, Motos... !!! that helped, but without some kind of map that would work off road, it still didn't work well for me.

I wound up buying a mid-range Garmin handheld and a bicycle mount. One good set of 2500mAh AA batteries would last me the whole day. Worst case, you take two more AA with you. The handheld overcomes all of the problems above. It's worth your consideration.

 

[horacio_emilio]

great!
can you tell me which garmin did you get?
thanks

I gave a lot of thought to trying to play with my old 720 this way, but gave up on the idea pretty quickly. Lots of downsides:

1) The TomTom screen is OK, but not all that great when it comes to reflected glare. Not easy to use outdoors in the sun vs. in the car.

2) Coming up with a mount for the TomTom was problematic. Even the 3rd party mounts left me with some peculiar Rube Goldberg lash-up on the handlebars, all of which wasn't solid enough to avoid a lot of vibration which made the unit nearly impossible to read while riding.

3) My TomTom didn't really appreciate going off-road (we're talking a mountain bike here, right?) since it wants to snap to a road all the time, and TomTom doesn't produce trail maps for their units.

4) The battery life wasn't cutting it at all. Because of the glare issue, I found myself with the backlight turned up fairly high, and could only get about 1-1/2 hours use.

5) I had to load 3rd party software to get useful information. Very few TomTom models will produce a track log without adding 3rd party software. I was able to come up with a couple of packages from Le Web B@zar !!! Roadbooks, Liens, Calendrier, Essais, Motos... !!! that helped, but without some kind of map that would work off road, it still didn't work well for me.

I wound up buying a mid-range Garmin handheld and a bicycle mount. One good set of 2500mAh AA batteries would last me the whole day. Worst case, you take two more AA with you. The handheld overcomes all of the problems above. It's worth your consideration.

 

[gatorguy]

See Canderson's signature. :wave:

I personally purchased the Dakota 10 Bike and Hike bundle. Commonly available for less than $200, if includes a basic but effective bike mount, rubber case to reduce shocks if it hits the ground, a lanyard, and a DVD with Garmin's 100K topos.

Hint: There's a lot of very good quality and FREE offroad maps and map layers for Garmin devices at GPSFileDepot.com. Many of the FREE user-contributed maps are 24K and several offer transparency for combining with other mapsets. By the way, did I mention that these are FREE?

 

[canderson]

great!
can you tell me which garmin did you get?
thanks

As Gator points out, several (see the sig line). I find myself using the Dakota 20 on the bike more often than not. Unlike the old eTrex that used a new cover over the battery for the mount, the newer units use a 'universal' mount that works with several models and doesn't require swapping out the battery cover. It runs for a very long time on decent batteries -- I typically run a full 10 hours on a set depending upon how I manage the backlight. You'll find that these units use a lot less battery if you have them in some 'static' screen when you don't need them for navigation. Fire up the compass page or the map page only when you need it, and that will extend battery life. Of course, it's really easy to just swap in another pair of AAs, too.

The Dakota is much lighter than its bigger brother, the Oregon series. As a result, I find that it jiggles less in the mount over rougher terrain. That, besides better battery life, is one of the reasons I use it over my 450 on the bike.

 

[canderson]

Hint: There's a lot of very good quality and FREE offroad maps and map layers for Garmin devices at GPSFileDepot.com. Many of the FREE user-contributed maps are 24K and several offer transparency for combining with other mapsets. By the way, did I mention that these are FREE?

Yeah, I think you did mention that back there somewhere <g>.

The quality of the 24K topos at gpsfiledepot.com exceeds the 100K maps you get from Garmin in the "T" bundles. It costs an extra $100 to buy a 450T vs a 450, and for that, you only get the 100K maps. I figured it was better to save the $100 (especially since REI and Cabelas keep running the 450 for $250 every now and then) and load just the higher resolution topo maps that I wanted.

That said, if a person wants to buy the 24K maps from Garmin separately, those are now routable (they didn't used to be, but a year or two ago, that changed), so there could be an advantage there. Still, I'm cheap, and I got my routable maps from Open Streets (Free worldwide routable Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap). I only use these when I'm out of the country and on foot, though.

 

[mikealder]

I use a SatMap Active10 on the Mountain Bike with a mixture of 25K or 50K scale OS maps for UK use, these units are available soem European countries as well as America although they are not at the cheaper end of the price scale.
With a fully recharged battery you get a full days use out of it or alternately take out the rechargeable pack and fit the tripple AA carrier and use disposable batteries see Here

This is the Active10 on the left with an iPhone in an Otter box on the right (not much room for anything else), prior to the Active10 I used to use an old PDA in the Otter box for offroad mapping for walking or on the bike.



Another option for powering any device on a bike is to fit a water bottle cage and turn a water bottle in to a rechargeable battery pack, the last one I made contained a number of 11AHr size D cells potted in a sillicon gel, the output for the bottle was a ciggy lighter socket fitted in the top of the bottle, my mate is still using one of these to power his high power lights on a road racer, to use it with a sat nav you simply plug the car charger lead in to the ciggy socket in the top of the bottle - Mike

 

[canderson]

...the last one I made contained a number of 11AHr size D cells potted in a sillicon gel...

Now that's interesting. What on earth did you use to recharge that home-made pack? I assume these were NiMH, and require a -ΔV style charger, and at some considerable current (unless you've got days to wait!).

 

[mikealder]

The charger was/ is made by Ansmann and can auto sense the number of cells and type, typical charging times for the "bottle" takes overnight but thats not an issue - Mike

 

[canderson]

The charger was/ is made by Ansmann and can auto sense the number of cells and type, typical charging times for the "bottle" takes overnight but thats not an issue - Mike

Sure would be interested in having a closer look at that. Ansmann is sold through an outfit called Horizon over here in the U.S., and I'd never seen a gadget like that in their collection - but could be I'm looking for the wrong thing. Do they have a name, model# or something for that style of charger?

 

[mikealder]

Have a look at This But I have a funny feeling it was This One I used for the 11,000mAHr pack, the charger didn't seem to have an issue with the "Battery Bottle" and is still in use today - Mike

 

[canderson]

Nuts. The heftiest thing from Ansmann that Horizon sells over here is 1.2A charge current. Anyway, I like the multi-D idea if I can ever find something that will manage something that size.