Leveraging the Scalene Triangle Sensor Method for difficult bikes to attach a sensor.

Leveraging the Scalene Triangle Sensor Method for difficult bikes to attach a sensor.

We’ve been mounting sensors to bikes for 3+ years now. Some bikes are really easy, others are really really difficult. There are a class of bikes that have placed the shock deep in the frame, making it really difficult to mount to. As long as we can take some simple measurements and we know the leverage curve of the bike, we can measure something other than the shock and translate that motion to the rear axle motion. 
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We’ve been mounting sensors to bikes for 3+ years now. Some bikes are really easy, others are really really difficult. There are a class of bikes that have placed the shock deep in the frame, making it really difficult to mount to. As long as we can take some simple measurements and we know the leverage curve of the bike, we can measure something other than the shock and translate that motion to the rear axle motion. 


In the preceding diagram, we have a Santa Cruz V10. The white dot is a pivot we plan to measure with our sensor. If we know the instantaneous angle from its starting point, we can calculate the rear axle position. We decided to pull out some old geometry we haven’t seen in decades. The sort of triangle formed above is called a scalene triangle. Without going into the formula and how we calculate the degree, we simplified all of this for you and you just need  to capture 3 measurements with the bike lifted off the ground. 


  1. The distance from the center-points of the 2 blue dots. This is the eye to eye center of the sensor. 
  2. The distance from the center of the white dot (main of the link) to each of the blue dots.

In our app, choose your bike make/model. If we support this method of measurement, it will be called out as “Scalene Sensor” in the app. Choose this method, lift the bike off the ground, and put these measurements (in mm) into the app. 


Once this is done, it’s a set it and forget it task. 

Here is another example on a 2020 Specialized Enduro. 

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