Record a Ride With Your Phone
A Zero logs everything about the motorcycle and nothing about where it went — there is no GPS in the bike. A phone in your pocket fills that in, and adds elevation, lean and cornering the bike never records.
The short version
- Install Sensor Logger (Android or iOS).
- Enable the sensors in the table below.
- Start recording before you set off; stop it after you park.
- Export the recording — it produces a
.zip. - Drop that zip on your timeline page. Nothing else to fill in.
You do not choose a bike, a ride, or a time offset. The timestamps say which ride it was, and a single recording covering several rides is split between them.
Which sensors to enable
| Sensor | Need | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Location | required | The route itself, plus speed and heading. Without it there is nothing to place on a map. |
| Orientation | required | The phone’s attitude. This is what makes every other motion sensor usable no matter how the phone is carried. |
| Accelerometer | required | Lean angle, cornering and braking forces, total G. |
| Gyroscope | recommended | How fast you turn and how fast you lay the bike over, and from those the radius of each corner. |
| Barometer | recommended | A finer elevation profile than GPS, which is what makes the gradient trace honest. |
| Gravity | recommended | Used with the accelerometer to recover total acceleration. |
| Magnetometer | optional | Only used to check the orientation maths. Safe to leave off. |
| Uncalibrated variants | optional | Ignored. They are raw pre-calibration data for sensor-fusion work. |
Switching on more than this costs battery and file size without adding anything the app reads.
More sensors means a bigger file and a flatter battery, not better data. Everything above the “optional” line is used; nothing below it is.
Four things that will cost you the ride
A phone that cannot see the sky
Inside a jacket, behind a tank bag, in a valley or between tall buildings, GPS accuracy degrades badly — a phone that normally places itself within a few metres can drift to hundreds, or report a position it has essentially guessed. Every fix carries the phone’s own estimate of how wrong it might be, and we discard the ones it does not stand behind. A bad placement therefore never invents distance; it just leaves you with less of your route than you rode. A top pocket, a bar mount or the top of a tank bag all work.
Each fix carries the phone's own estimate of how wrong it might be. Where that estimate is poor the position can be far off, and adding those hops up can inflate a route several times over — so they are discarded rather than drawn.
Starting the recording too late
A recording has to overlap the ride by more than a few seconds to be that ride’s route. Start it while you are still putting your gloves on. If it only clips the start we will tell you so rather than draw a three-point map.
Start before you set off and stop after you park. A recording that only clips the edge of a ride is refused rather than used to draw a route from three points.
Long rides get sampled more slowly
Sensor Logger asks the phone for a high sample rate, and the phone does not always oblige. Once the screen goes off and power saving kicks in, the operating system throttles what it actually delivers — so a short recording can arrive several times denser than a long one, and GPS can drop from roughly a fix a second to one every few seconds. Nothing is broken when this happens; a long ride simply draws a more angular route and a coarser lean trace. Keeping the screen on, disabling battery saver, and exempting the app from background restrictions all help.
A bike clock set to local time
Your phone records in UTC. If your dashboard clock is set to local time, every ride sits hours away from the recording. We spot the whole-hour offset and ask you to confirm it — we never apply it silently, because a walk and a ride look identical if you are allowed to slide the clock until something lines up.
About lean angle
The lean angle we show is worked out from lateral acceleration — the angle at which the combined force runs through the tyres. That is physics, so it does not depend on where the phone is or which way up it sits. A phone loose in a pocket gives the same answer as one clamped to the bars.
The resultant of gravity and cornering force runs down the line of the machine. Its angle is the lean, and an accelerometer anywhere on the bike measures it — in a pocket, in a tank bag or clamped to the bars.
If you do mount the phone we also work out how far off vertical the cradle sits, and say so. A phone held in a mount keeps that offset almost perfectly steady; one carried loose wanders by tens of degrees as you move, and that difference is what tells the two apart. The figure is shown for interest only — it is never applied to the lean trace, which does not need it.
Lean, yaw rate, roll rate and corner radius are all withheld below 15 km/h. Under that speed a phone is measuring you wheeling the bike around or walking with it in a pocket, and presenting that as a lean angle would be nonsense.
What you get back
On the ride page: the route on a map, colourable by any channel, plus a chart for each of these that your recording actually carries.
- • Elevation and gradient
- • GPS speed and heading
- • Lean angle
- • Lateral, longitudinal and vertical G
- • Total G-force
- • Yaw rate and roll rate
- • Corner radius
- • Acceleration and braking
All of it lines up against the bike’s own telemetry — speed, state of charge, power, temperatures — on a shared time axis, so you can put what the bike did next to what the road was doing.
If the recording stopped partway, the ride page says what percentage of the ride it covers and where the gaps are. We never draw a line across missing minutes.
Uploading
Export from Sensor Logger, then drop the .zip onto the card at the top of your timeline. You will get one of these back:
- Attached — matched to one ride.
- Split — it spanned several rides and each got its own stretch.
- Clock offset suspected — nothing overlaps, but a whole-hour shift would line it up. Confirm and it attaches.
- Too short or no matching ride — with the numbers, so you can see why.
A plain .gpx from a Garmin, Strava or a lap timer works too — attach it from the ride page. You get the route and whatever channels the file carries, but not the phone-only ones.