$6 power meter? Tech firm claim they can make a power meter for just $6

It would be worthwhile to add to these kinds of articles that many companies have tried (and failed) to bring a cheap power-meter to market. They were lured by what appear to be low costs compared with sticker prices. Maybe it would be nice to write an article about all the attempts at cheap power meters that failed - remember those power meters you could install yourself on your own cranks, as well as various kick starters?

Strain gauges are cheap and have been cheap for a long time. What's expensive is integrating them into a reliable, precise, and accurate system. The engineering (hardware and software) and then the manufacturing (including calibration of each individual unit) is expensive. To get accurate numbers you need to know the orientation of the crank... getting wireless transmission to work reliably is also not super easy.

You must then also remember that these devices are subject to the rigors of the road - temperature variations, water, impacts, etc...

I do think there is a demand for articles which help clear up misconceptions and myths, but they take a bit more time to research and write than what reads as little more than copy+paste from a press kit

Why not ask DC Rainmaker about this artical and he will be laughing for hours, sure they can produce a strain guage for $6, but that will not work against all cranks, look at Shimano, nobody has been able (including Shimano) to make an accurate PM for their Ultegra and Dura-Acr crank due to its costruction, also Software, taking the physical movement and turning that into the actual powe figures is massively hard thing to do, we may not like it but we have to pay for the R&D for all parts of the PM, I bet Stages costs hardly anything to build the actual module, but they spent millions developing it, charging the $30 fmanufacturing cost of the unit will never recoup the R&D costs, saying all of this... PM's are still too expensive 😉 

The bike industry (as most big business) is a complete rip off. It's nice to see it exposed and seems to be happening more and more nowadays which is good. More spent on marketing than the products. And a lot of very expensive stuff made very cheaply/badly.

Is that type face on the crank really chosen to look at first glance like Team Twatt?

I remember a couple of years ago I read a long piece on how power meters couldn't EVER be produced for low cost due to techno blah blah blah reason......but yet here we are.

Hopefully it will be game over for £400+power meters, a bit like bike lighting prices have dropped massively due to LEDs etc.

Standard bicycle-industry markup on a $6 component will probably result in a finished product price of around $200, available in shops in the UK for £199.

Excellent - I'd buy some powermeter cranks if the price comes down enough.