What is BODAQS?

BODAQS (Bicycle open data acquisition system) is an open-source, build-it-yourself data collection and analysis system for mountain bikes, designed to be accessible to anyone with some DIY skills and a curiosity about what their bike is actually doing.

Data acquisition is ubiquitous in motorsport, and it’s making its way into mountain-bike racing too. But for the engineering-minded (or budget-constrained), the choice is often between costly professional systems or consumer tools that keep the underlying data hidden.

BODAQS aims to offer an alternative: hardware that can be built with basic soldering skills using widely available parts; software with deep functionality and a structure designed for long-term expansion; and analysis built on powerful, free tools — alongside mounting and mechanical designs that can be 3D printed at home or produced at low cost.

The problem with mountain bike (suspension) tuning

For most riders, suspension setup is a vibe-based, iterative guessing game: Adjust a click, do a run, wonder if that made things better or just ‘different’, repeat to exhaustion.

At the sharp end of gravity racing, teams with the budget chase these problems using data - but at a high cost. A few consumer products - notably Shockwiz, now owned by SRAM - have bridged the gap with a product that can provide meaningful suspension insight for most riders and be set up in under twenty minutes. But ShockWiz is a closed system: the algorithm is proprietary, the data never leaves the device, and if you run a coil shock, you’re out of luck.

For the rider who wants to go deeper, wants to do more with the data, or whose coil setup isn’t supported,the choice has been: trust a black box, go all in on professional equipment, or go without.

The device

The BODAQS logger is a compact, hackable, open-source data logger you build yourself from widely available components using basic soldering skills and a 3D printer. It records inputs from suspension and other sensors, at up to 1000Hz, and stores the data as standard CSV files readable by almost anything. The device can connect to wifi to allow settings to be edited or log files downloaded using any device with a web browser.

A small OLED screen and keypad make it simple to use, and an optional handlebar-mounted button lets you tag moments of interest mid-ride — a heavy landing, a sketchy section — so they’re easy to find later.

The full design is open: PCB schematics and layouts, firmware, case, sensor mounts and more are all available to build, hack, and improve. There’s a full bill of materials, build guide and advice on where to purchase the parts required.

The analysis

Recording data is an engineering problem. Deciding what it means is the harder part, and the part that actually matters for tuning.

BODAQS uses a Python analysis framework built on widely used open tools. A preprocessing pipeline cleans and validates your logs into consistent, comparable sessions. Automated event detection finds the moments that matter: jump landings, deep compressions, whatever. Comparison tools let you visualise sessions, isolate events, and measure what happens when you change your setup. The framework is deliberately transparent: you can see every step from raw sensor signal to output metric.

It isn’t designed to hand you a suspension report card (but if we ever build one, you will be able to see exactly where its conclusions came from). It’s designed to help you build real understanding of what your bike is actually doing when you are riding it, on your trails, the way you ride.

Who it’s for

BODAQS is designed to scale with the user — in both the build, and the analysis.

If you’re new to data acquisition, the hardware guide walks you through assembling the logger, and you’ll have something real to look at after your first ride with a couple of sensors - or even just one.

If you’re a top-end rider, mechanic or suspension shop with your own battle-tested ideas on how a bike should be set up, you’ll have something you can use to test out and validate your own ideas and work, race faster, or to add value to your customers.

If you’re a tinkerer, engineer, developer, data scientist or uncategorised nerd, you can contribute to the project. Code, designs, ideas, feedback - it’s all welcome.

Enough of the pitch - where’s this thing actually at?

TL;DR: we’ve made a lot of progress and have a pretty usable system. It isn’t there yet, but if you want to be a beta tester, we’re ready for you.

The hardware works well within the limits of what we have tested and we think the user experience is pretty good.
We’re compatible with data.syn.bike so you can see your data presented usefully straight away.
We have sourcing, building, and user guides.
We have published packages for the hardware and the 3d printed case
We have a set of Jupyter Lab analysis notebooks for exploratory data analysis. The back end code is organised in Python modules and there is a documented API.

What we’re working on:

Our own web-based analysis platform. This is going to take some time: there are already some great analysis and visualisation tools (syn.bike for example) so we’ll stay prototyping in Jupyter Lab until we have something with a genuine and useful point of difference.
Extending the range of supported sensors. We’ve gone heavy (overkill?) on our software design to make integration of additional sensor types simple, so now is the time to cash in. Our first priorities are GPS and inertia-motion units. You can merge GPS data from Garmin files right now, but we want an onboard GPS option.
Collecting build feedback from our beta testers. We’re looking for people who want to help with this!
Getting the system under some faster riders - in the end, we want to do data analysis, not just build hardware and software.

We have a side project to design a low cost build-it-yourself string potentiometer too. We’ll publish the design when it’s been tested a bit more.

Start building Assemble your tools and components, and get to building your own logger.