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Hands on: Cycliq Fly12

New front light and camera unit has tons of new tech crammed in

Cycliq, the people that brought the world the Fly6 rear-facing camera light, have been working hard on a new product, the Fly12. It's an integrated light and camera for the front of your bike and it was successfully funded on Kickstarter earlier this year, with 1,720 backers pledging a grand total of $668,721 AUD to bring the product to life. And we met up with Andrew Hagen of Cycliq at Eurobike to have a first play with a functional prototype.

Fly6 Mk2 review

So what's to know? It's a bigger and more fully featured bit of kit than the Fly6, and that's reflected in the price, which is likely to be around £220 in the UK. It's quite weighty, but no more so than a separate camera and light, and of course it only takes up one mounting spot on your bike. Much of the weight comes from the batteries: the Fly12 contains two batteries for a grand total of 5400mAh of capacity; compare that to other cameras which normally don't have more than 1500mAh and you'll see how Cycliq manage to get an eight-hour runtime for the camera. That's your whole sportive, then.

It attaches to your bike using the same mount technology as a GoPro, so you'll be able to mount it on your bars or hang it from underneath an out-front mount from the likes of K-Edge.

 

the 400-lumen light runs off the same battery of course, so having that on too drops the run time down to a minimum of two hours with the light on full blast. It has a number of intensity settings and flashing options, more on that later.

The big difference is that the Fly12 is WiFi enabled, and designed to work in tandem with an app on your smartphone. It can do all sorts of clever stuff.

The Fly6 is predominantly a passive device, gathering data in case anything untoward happens on your ride. The Fly12 is a more social beast.

 

Once your Fly12 is connected with your phone, the first thing you can do is change the settings. The camera will record in 1080p up to 45 frames a second, or 720p up to 60 frames a second. The light has thee constant and three flashing modes. You can toggle through them with the power button, but you can also select the ones you want from the app. So if you don't want flashing modes, you can just turn all of those off.

If you've been out on a ride and you've stopped at a cafe, you can use the app to browse through the video you've shot. The camera can stream lo-resolution footage to the app for viewing, and if you want to crop out a particular highlight you can do that within the app. The Fly12 will then crop the footage and upload the full-resolution version to your phone so you can share it in whatever way you fancy.

Cycliq will also be adding the capability to add tram lines to the footage. They'll show how close other vehicles are to you, and if you live somewhere that has a minimum passing distance law that could well be handy if someone buzzes you on a ride and you end up in a hedge.

As well as that there will be two alarm modes. The first is an incident alert: the Fly12 will use accelerometers and axis sensors to guess if you've had a stack. So if there's a big impact and then the bike ends up on its side, the camera will assume you've had some kind of incident and will be able to interact with the app to send a text to an emergency contact, in the same manner as other devices such as the ICE Dot.

ICEdot Crash Sensor and Band review

There'll be a theft alarm too. The camera and app can tell how far you are from the bike from the strength of the WiFi signal. So if the bike starts moving and you're not on it, it can alert you.


The greyed out menu items are still works in progress

One other interesting development is integration with Strava. The Fly12 timestamps footage using the GPS time signal from your phone. Using the Strava API, you'll be able to overlay data onto the top of the video, and that'll allow you to make some rich video. If you keep it to 15-second sections and upload them to Instagram, and you've linked your Instagram account with your Strava one, you'll even be able to display the vids on your Strava ride.

That's a fair bit of interesting stuff from one device. Final prototyping is happening now, and the Kickstarter orders will be fulfilled in the new year, with units likely to be available for sale in the Spring.

Dave is a founding father of road.cc, having previously worked on Cycling Plus and What Mountain Bike magazines back in the day. He also writes about e-bikes for our sister publication ebiketips. He's won three mountain bike bog snorkelling World Championships, and races at the back of the third cats.

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21 comments

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tritecommentbot | 7 years ago
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Really nice bit of kit. Two in one is so much more appealing than having two seperate devices mounted.

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Dante256 | 7 years ago
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I've been lucky enough to be knocking around, some people have been a little disappointmented with the quality of the Fly12 camera. 

I think it's an exceptionally good safety camera, and a good action camera. I've recently completed a review on TitaniumGeek, and have included two videos comparing with the Garmin Virb XE quality

here is the link if people want to see the comparison

 

http://www.titaniumgeek.com/gear-reviews/fly12-review-action-camera-and-...

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Bez | 8 years ago
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Are there differences between the Mk1 and Mk2 Fly6? I was a Mk1 kickstarter, and I have to say I'd put its video quality in the "not awesome" box: it's quite often hard or impossible to read plates (though you can of course record notable ones by shouting them out, if you're not too busy crapping yourself at the time). I have a Polaroid Cube and a Rideye to compare with, and I'd say the Fly6 Mk1 is on a par with the former. The Rideye blows the others out of the water in terms of video quality (once you've spent half your life getting it mounted without wobbling).

So are we all talking about the same video quality?

I do love the Fly6's simplicity, though. I use it a lot more than either of the front camera, simply because I can strap it on and go (though it's rendered useless if I'm using a seat pack). And the battery life is a hugely important feature. With hindsight I wish I'd kickstarted the Fly12 as well, but I was still waiting (and waiting…) on my Rideye.

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Mungecrundle | 8 years ago
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Cyclic,

Thanks for taking the time to comment on people's comments, I take this as a clear demonstration of your company listening to it's customers.

Just to be clear of my meaning, "expensive" does not mean poor value.

I'd also suggest another advantage of your design, in that it is not obviously a camera. Not because I condone secret filming to catch people out (however much they might deserve to be), but because it removes a particular source of antagonism that people are becoming more resentful of having cameras conspicuously pointed at them. It's a bit like when I am travelling in the USA in certain states that allow citizens to carry concealed weapons. I am aware that there is probably some muppet who is packing a gun to go to the supermarket but I'm happier not to see that are doing so.

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Batchy | 8 years ago
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OK then ! I'm tempted. Can it be fitted to a helmet ?

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kie7077 replied to Batchy | 8 years ago
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Article says it uses the same mounting tech as gopro so I guess that's a yes.

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Cycliq | 8 years ago
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Thank you all for your comments and please keep them coming. It is a great help for us to hear your thoughts and comments (good or bad). A big and special thank you to our Kickstarter backers and people that pre-order from us. You are our fuel to make our products better so everyone can benefit from it. Below we have tried to address all the comments in one post so forgive the length of it....

FATBEGGARONABIKE
We have designed Fly12 so you can use it exactly like Fly6....just as a camera & a light. You don’t ‘need’ the smartphone to use it. If you want to use the rich feature list, you will need to use the app. We do understand that not everyone wants all the features however they are there if you would like to use them! Please believe me when I say that we have applied the KISS principle. There is just one button to operate Fly12 if you don’t want the smartphone features…that’s pretty simple! We don’t need two versions - it is simple if that is your want or it is feature rich if you want to use our smartphone app….cool, hey?

Batchy
Fly12 takes awesome footage. Simple as that! There are a few little design reasons why our footage will be more stable/watchable than the other big brand action cameras - namely we have designed it for us cyclists in mind. When considering the value of Fly12, we think of it like an iPhone…feature rich to be sure if we want all the bells and whistles but at the end of the day, it makes phone calls too!

Plasterer’s Radio
If you have any issues with Fly6 please contact support [at] cycliq.com and we will get you sorted straight away with our friendly and attentive support team. If you don’t have any issues with Fly6 then it does exactly what it says on the box. We don’t over promise and nor do we want to. Your satisfaction with our products is very important to us so please let us know so we can address you concern.

KiwaiMike
The 720@60fps is pretty cool, for sure! Even with 720@30fps we can still capture number plates in a number of situations. What we find tho is that the ambient conditions have a large effect on how well you capture plates. Light conditions seem to play the greatest role in this regard. it is more about the direction of the sun/light in relation to the camera as opposed to ‘how much light’. By way of example, this vehicle passed a cyclist at probably over 60MPH and yet even with 30fps the number plate is very clear on a number of frames https://vimeo.com/108426178

bikebot
We are of course biased about our products however there is no better way to show how we feel about them than by showing footage that users send us like this on: https://vimeo.com/137223278 where the quality of the footage is awesome. Here is another recent video submitted by a customer: https://vimeo.com/133534288 If these videos are “fairly awful” in your opinion then it would be great to learn what the very cheap action cameras you refer to are so we can learn to make our products better. Fly12 will have higher quality footage due to a number of factors including a better camera sensor, better microprocessor, better lens and lots of other ‘better stuff’! We think you will be impressed.

Pavery1
Thank you so much for your comments….we live for them. We have such a small but dedicated team that tries to deliver products that exceed our customers expectations. Comments like yours fuel our passion to keep innovating...much appreciated.

Gizmo_
The trim/edits are done on the app, as you said, using the phones impressive processing power. Glad you like it!

mrchrispy
Our products don’t get shipped from Australia (where we live) and all Kickstarter backers and people that pre-order will be sent their Fly12 units with duty paid (we learnt that lesson from our first KIckstarter campaign)

Mungecrundle
Pricing products is like a science experiment with 15 ingredients, 5 processes and 11 different rules to work within. When you say ‘expensive’, we like to compare our offering against what else is available. As it happens, there are not any direct comparisons on the market. So we compare our features to other products such as action cameras and 400 lumen lights. When we compare these things to our products we find Fly12 is in most cases, cheaper, lighter, easier to use, takes up less space on the bike, lasts for longer, looks better (ok…that one is our opinion!) and address critical issues that us cyclists need like weather proofing, incident protection and looping record to name a few. As mentioned before, we are very biased however it’s hard to argue against all that. At the end of the day and as you said, we really are trying to develop a better product.

A note should be provided to the Road.cc team who we met at Eurobike. Great to catch up & keep up the outstanding work. Always good to see a small team punching above their weight.

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bikebot replied to Cycliq | 8 years ago
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Cycliq wrote:

bikebot
We are of course biased about our products however there is no better way to show how we feel about them than by showing footage that users send us like this on: https://vimeo.com/137223278 where the quality of the footage is awesome. Here is another recent video submitted by a customer: https://vimeo.com/133534288 If these videos are “fairly awful” in your opinion then it would be great to learn what the very cheap action cameras you refer to are so we can learn to make our products better. Fly12 will have higher quality footage due to a number of factors including a better camera sensor, better microprocessor, better lens and lots of other ‘better stuff’! We think you will be impressed.

So here's a comparison, these are front and rear views from my bike passing through Dorking during RideLondon. I use this location as the Sun is at 90° to one side, so the illumination is almost the same in both images.

Front Camera - http://i.imgur.com/DfJFGNO.jpg
Rear Camera - http://i.imgur.com/c8R15Gr.jpg

And here is a close-up showing similar details at the same distance. Note brickwork, shop signs, flowers, lampposts etc.

//i.imgur.com/GiCovQ4.jpg)

The top image is from a Mobius camera, which you can buy for under £50. The bottom image is the Fly6. The image quality of the SJCAMS (4000, M10), which tend to be more popular with cyclists is about the same as the Mobius, as is the price.

I don't think it's realistic to endorse the Fly6 as a camera that provides "awesome" footage unless you want disappointed customers. I own one and I think it's a very good product which I have recommended. That's not on the basis of it being the best rear light or the best camera, but on it's being a well designed product matched to a particular use.

I was interested to see what you would produce for a front camera, but the Fly12 wasn't what I was hoping for. I won't explain why here, as I wish you and your company well with its launch and I'm sure many will be happy with it. If you do want to know, contact me privately.

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Russell Orgazoid replied to Cycliq | 8 years ago
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Plasterer’s Radio
If you have any issues with Fly6 please contact support [at] cycliq.com and we will get you sorted straight away with our friendly and attentive support team. If you don’t have any issues with Fly6 then it does exactly what it says on the box. We don’t over promise and nor do we want to. Your satisfaction with our products is very important to us so please let us know so we can address you concern.

I think one of my previous comments was misinterpreted!

When I said 'It will'....I meant that the Fly12 will be excellent, just like my Fly6.

The Fly6 is the reason I signed up and paid up early for the Fly12.

It does exactly what it says (Fly6) and I find the footage excellent. More than adequate.

Keep up the good work, Cycliq.

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Mungecrundle | 8 years ago
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Expensive, but isn't it refreshing to see a company attempting to develop a genuinely better product to justify the price, rather than investing a lot of money in building a brand image that then needs to be recouped from the customer.

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mrchrispy | 8 years ago
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I'm really liking the look of this, the fly6 is a great bit of kit (I took the plunge at the new £99 price when wiggle started doing them).

I missed kickstarter but there were doing a preorder price of £180, supposed to ship end of this year but the biggest problem for me was it'd ship from downunder and we'd probably get stung for import duty here in the UK. I'm going to wait till wiggle get them over here.

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jollygoodvelo | 8 years ago
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Very interesting stuff. I don't quite see why the Fly12 does the crop/edit stuff - surely it would make more sense to send it to the app and let the phone's processing (and battery) do it. But still, very interesting tech and very well integrated.

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Pavery1 | 8 years ago
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I think that's cool. It's a lot more than I expected. You have to give them marks for pushing things forward. Sit in a coffe shop and look at a fast decent or section of road on your phone. That's brilliant!

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Batchy | 8 years ago
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All this Stava/Smart Phone /Gismo/ Teasmaid stuff is fine. But does the thing take decent images/footage. If not, it will be a waste of good money !

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Russell Orgazoid replied to Batchy | 8 years ago
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Batchy wrote:

All this Stava/Smart Phone /Gismo/ Teasmaid stuff is fine. But does the thing take decent images/footage. If not, it will be a waste of good money !

If it's like the Fly6. It will.

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KiwiMike replied to Russell Orgazoid | 8 years ago
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Plasterer's Radio wrote:
Batchy wrote:

All this Stava/Smart Phone /Gismo/ Teasmaid stuff is fine. But does the thing take decent images/footage. If not, it will be a waste of good money !

If it's like the Fly6. It will.

I'm looking forward to seeing the 60FPS mode. if a car passes you doing more than about 40MPH difference the Fly6 had great trouble picking out a clear rego plate.

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bikebot replied to Russell Orgazoid | 8 years ago
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Plasterer's Radio wrote:
Batchy wrote:

All this Stava/Smart Phone /Gismo/ Teasmaid stuff is fine. But does the thing take decent images/footage. If not, it will be a waste of good money !

If it's like the Fly6. It will.

I like the Fly6, but compared to even very cheap action cameras the image quality is fairly awful. That's mostly fine for how that device is used (security), but if you want to shoot pretty video look elsewhere.

It looks like the Fly12 will be a lot better.

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Bob's Bikes | 8 years ago
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Sounds absolutely brilliant IF you are conversant with all this technology, it seems you would (according to the write up) need a smart phone to adjust the settings. Speaking for myself who is not so much of a Luddite but a firm believer in the KISS principle I would love it if they did two versions of this a basic (passive) model like the fly6 and this other one with all the bells and whistles.

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hawkinspeter replied to Bob's Bikes | 8 years ago
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I've got no idea whether you can change the settings without a smartphone, but I would expect that the cyclists who are in the market for such a product will most likely already have a smartphone or will know someone with one.

I didn't join the Kickstarter campaign at the time, but after getting a Fly6 (when it dropped to under £100) I was very impressed with the video quality and have pre-ordered the Fly12 on that basis. It looks like they've got better mounting options than the bracket supplied with the Fly6 - I managed to break 2 brackets within a week!

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CXR94Di2 | 8 years ago
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I'm a kickstarter  1

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Russell Orgazoid replied to CXR94Di2 | 8 years ago
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CXR94Di2 wrote:

I'm a kickstarter  1

Me too.

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