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

The old app was great. Pretty accurate readings were given. Since the new update/redesign the app is pretty garbage. I can get readings, but the timeframe of when I actually get the reading or what it's getting it from mis random. This is coming from a zero tech who works with this app pretty frequently. It takes me twice as long to get a belt tension done because I can't tell what the hell this app is reading for sound.

Completely useless app. Frequencies are all over the place using the exact same position and finger and strength. Closing and opening the app and changing literally nothing about the bike and you can count on getting wildly different results. I wouldn't rely on this app to tune anything. Also whoever's idea it was to kill the app instantly in the background so you have to find and open it again and watch the dumb video that automatically should never develop another app again.

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

- Fixed calculations spinner default values calculations
- Added settings switch to turn off initial video
- Added Unit of measure switch to settings to change Center Distance measure and calculation.
- Improved microphone frequency calculation algorithm