Carbon Drive

Gates Corporation

About this app

Gates Carbon Drive is the high-tech belt drive for bicycles, motorcycles, & scooters. This app measures belt tension sonically. Just pluck your belt like a guitar string and use the microphone on your phone to read the vibration frequency. Compare your bicycle belt’s frequency to the included chart to see if you need to adjust the tension. For scooter/motorcycle tension recommendations, compare to your vehicle owner’s manual.

Other available features for bicycles:

Interested in key parameters of your bicycle belt drive like speed ratio or center distance? Want to know what belt lengths or sprocket sizes will fit your bicycle? What about comparing one bike to another to tweak your ratio perfectly? With our calculator, you can stay on top of the perfect setup for your drive.

- Find key parameters of your drive such as speed ratio and center distance.
- Change belt length or sprocket sizes to better suit your riding needs.

Ratings and reviews

First, their symbols for microphone recording is bad. When the microphone is blue, then that means it's recording. I thought it was a button that I needed to press to start recording. Second, as I pluck the belt, I don't get near consistent frequencies. I get 20Hz, 40Hz, and 85Hz among others. This means the method of plucking has enough variation to render the test useless for tuning. There's gotta be a better way. I'll pay for a tool that'll physically measure the tension.

This app is good only to remind yourself what the acceptable frequency range is for your bike. The frequency detection is useless. Instead, use the Spectroid app with these settings: Sampling rate: 16kHz FFT size: 8192 Decimations: 1 Window: Hamming Smoothing: 0 After plucking the belt you should see all frequencies jump, but one frequency will decay slower than the rest, and Spectroid should detect it as a peak. That's the fundamental frequency that you're trying to adjust.

You get what you pay for, and that about sums up this free app. That and "utterly unreliable & inaccurate." The app fails on so many points, demonstrating why tech is a false hope: User must "strum" the belt drive with phone mic pointed to belt. Even then, phone doesn't register 90% of strums. This with a new phone with mics on either end in a silent room. When the app does register, values are all over the board. 93, 22, 110, 54... Statistically, "quality" is the absence of variation around a goal (in this case actual tension). With such wide variation, we have a clear lack of quality or reliability. The app does not allow personalizing the app for your bike(s) (aside from turning off that awful video). Instead you get a generic tension chart that is ambiguous if you have gear box-driven mtn bike. Since proper tension IS important, I gave up on this app in favor of their Kriket device to measure tension. While simplistic, it IS reliable and I believe accurate. And my thumb which does the strumming thanks me for doing so.

What's new

Code Improvements and Bug fixes