Can’t tell about other brands, but one reason I decided to pull the trigger and get myself a Wahoo (an Elemnt Roam v2) after a lifetime of not having any cycling head unit whatsoever was that it has a clock (well, and the maps and altitude/inclination info). I’d bet other Wahoos have this feature too. I’d be really, really surpsised if Garmins don’t have this feature - I’d say that stating that “most head units don’t have this feature” is bs.
Granted, I wish the wahoo had a setting to get rid of the “a.m./p.m.” text, which makes the numbers a bit too small compared to other numbers in the screen. When asked support about this they replied me something in the lines of “the unit follows the setting of the phone it is paired to”, so if your phone shows time in 12 hour format, then the unit does so, and if the phone shows time in 24 hour format, so does your unit. Which is a bit nonsensical but it’s still great to be able to see the time of the day there. I wish I could had that thing/could afford such a thing when I had to go to uni and work.
I have a clock on the display on my Garmin 830. I also have sunset displayed on another screen, at I often ride in the evening and don’t want to get caught out after dark.
You might be surprised that keeping time on an embedded system like that adds quite a level of extra hardware to it. And if you actually want good time, then it gets expensive.
Adding a realtime clock chip to an embedded device is incredibly cheap. You can buy a five-pack of realtime clock/calendar chips for a buck fifty on eBay. Surface mount chips purchased in bulk would be even cheaper.
No one needs “good” time. Losing or gaining even a whole second a day is irrelevant to anyone’s biking. Once in a blue moon, you fix the clock. It’d be no worse than the clock in your car.
I really don’t know what you mean by “quite a level of extra hardware.” It’s totally not. The computers already have a battery. All it needs is one tiny extra chip.
First, in most embedded systems, “a buck fifty” is a lot of money. Then you need to have an interface free on the main controller. You need an extra 32768Hz quarz. And you usually use a seperate battery (usually a mercury cell) to feed it to avoid complicated power routing issues.
“a buck fifty” is a lot of money
That was for a five pack at retail. Surface mount chips would be much cheaper. Even if it were $1 per chip, that would not be a lot of money. I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face.
Then you need to have an interface free on the main controller
OK. The ones pictured in the article had large, full color screens. A UI designer can surely squeeze a clock in there.
But that’s moot. We were talking about price.
avoid complicated power routing issues
You’re just making up problems to sound smart to defend your ridiculous claim that a realtime clock component is expensive. Stop changing the subject and just admit that your original comment was incorrect. Adding a clock to a device like a bicycle computer is very inexpensive.
The only reason not to include one is because making products under capitalism is a race to the bottom. Removing $1 per unit when selling a million units is a savings of $1M. If most people don’t care about a clock, then that’s just money in the bank. But you saying that would be “surprisingly expensive” and a “lot of extra hardware” is just nonsense. And your other arguments against adding a clock are also spurious.
Not sure about your part of the world, but here there is some time signal coming through by radio and that allows us to set clocks automatically. They are also dirt cheap - I recently bought a whole alarm clock with that feature for 5€, so the component itself can’t be that expensive. So I’m not sure if that really is the reason for Bosch to not include that in their eBike controllers
But those take several minutes from power on to showing the time. Which might irritate the user.
You can work around that - eBikes have a battery, this really doesn’t use much power and therefore you can just keep receiving the current time while nobody is cycling without any issues.
