Alerts

Most wheel apps give you one checkbox: beep when PWM goes above this number. Here that checkbox is replaced by a section where you build the warning yourself.

It has three parts: the alerts, the condition templates and the sound patterns.

Conditions#

A condition is a reading, a comparison and a threshold. The readings available are speed, PWM, battery voltage, average cell voltage, cell spread, battery current, phase current, power, charge level, controller temperature, motor temperature, pitch and roll angles, trip distance and total distance.

Two more fields are the point of the whole thing:

• Reset value. The alert stops at a value below the one that set it off, not at the same one. Without that, a warning chatters while the reading hovers on the threshold.
• Minimum duration. The condition has to hold for a set time before the alert fires. A brief spike over a bump does not raise an alarm.

One alert can hold several conditions, combined as "all of them" or "any of them". For example: speed above forty and PWM above eighty.

A condition can be saved as a template and reused in other alerts.

How an alert fires#

Three kinds:

• One shot. Once, when the conditions are met. It rearms when the reading has gone past the reset value, or after a timeout.
• Repeating. Repeats on a set interval while the conditions hold.
• Accelerating. The interval tightens as the reading approaches the dangerous end: from occasional beeps at the lower threshold to almost continuous at the upper one. The curve is yours to choose.

The accelerating kind exists for PWM. You do not hear "exceeded", you hear how close the edge is.

Priority#

Every alert has a priority: critical, high, medium or background. When several fire at once you hear the one that matters, not all of them at the same time.

Scope#

An alert is either global or bound to one specific wheel. The second is what you want when you own several wheels with different safe limits.

Sound#

The sound is built step by step in an editor of its own. Each step has a frequency, a duration, a pause after it, a volume and a waveform:

• sine, a soft beep;
• square, a hard alarm;
• sawtooth, the most aggressive;
• triangle, neutral.

The finished pattern can be previewed right in the editor and saved to a library for reuse in other alerts.

Commands to the wheel#

An alert can do more than beep: it can send a command to the wheel. Lower a limit, turn on the light.

This does not work everywhere, and it is deliberately fenced in:

• only on wheels that accept settings at all;
• only when the alert is bound to a specific wheel rather than global;
• only after you confirm a warning that changing settings while riding is dangerous.

Treat it as a sharp tool.