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

I used Carbon Drive to set the belt tensions on my exotic sports car. It worked perfectly. Two things that will make this tool easier to use: 1) Be very close to the belt with the microphone of your device. 2) Kill all sources of noise in the room, especially air conditioners and fans. They put out noise in the same frequency range and will mess up your readings. A third suggestion is to look closely at the microphone opening in your device. It's likely clogged with lint and crud. Clean it up!

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.

It seems like a decent app until you actually try to use it. It would not pick up most of my plucks, even when I tried using a smooth allen key to protect my finger and plucked hard enough to make the whole bike vibrate. I took in a bedroom to avoid even refrigerator compressor noise. Also tried with two different phone models. It would capture about one in six tries and the results were usually around 26 or in the high 70s.

What's new

Extended compatibility to older Android OS versions