Acumen Plug-In Gear Indicator

Reference to your question, No, the unit saw no rain/water. I'll admit I'm a fair weather rider, so the bike never saw rain. I was washing it at the end of the riding season before putting it up for winter.
Also, the bike does not sit outside in the weather. It was and still is parked in a closed garage, so there is no excuse for it come "unglued" and peel up the way it did.
As far as switching to something else, I have not. As you are probably aware, there aren't alot of options out there, especially the Plug n Play type.
Hope this helps you make a decision....good luck.

 

That's a bummer that it turned out to be a piece of poorly manufactured junk. I know how much you wanted it originally. For me personally, I have always viewed this device as useless, but I know a bunch of folks have purchased them. Nothing worse than overpriced stuff that doesn't work.

 

For what it's worth, my Honda dealer's master technician installed a new Acumen (red LED) on my '07 VFR not long after I corresponded with Benjammer last spring, and thus far (knock on wood) I've been very happy with it, and it seems to be holding up very well. (The unit is affixed to the left-hand side of the bottom or base of the Z-Technic mount for the Zumo 550 GPS. I have no photos of the Acumen in my gallery at this time however.)

When I first began riding with the Acumen, it seemed like it would frequently become momentarily 'confused', usually during rapid and successive downshifts, in which it would often take it a little time to figure out that the bike was in 1st gear, or perhaps neutral, or whatever. (On the other hand, from the outset it seemed to do a much better job of correctly tracking upshifts.)

And so when downshifting way low, it would often tend to search for a little while after the bike came to either a stop or a slow roll, but usually it would soon figure things out and then display the correct setting, especially if I helped it a little by feathered the clutch a bit while the motorcycle was stopped. (Doing so seems to greatly help the unit to re-orient itself when it's confused.)

But then as I continued to ride with the Acumen over the course of several thousand miles, I noticed an interesting trend: it clearly seemed to become increasingly and more consistently accurate and much less 'confused' during rapid and successive downshifts. This has caused me to wonder if the Acumen's microprocessor might be capable of some 'adaptive learning', which after all is becoming more and more common place with many digital gizmo's(?). Could be, don't know.

One thing I think I've since figured out is that the Acumen is much less likely to accurately 'count down' rapid downshifts when I'm in such a hurry to slow down that I may forget to 'blip' the throttle a bit before each downshift, and I guess this might make some sense because the unit is probably trying to somehow electronically/digitally monitor tangible and distinct changes in engine RPM's(?). At any rate, my unit has definitely seemed to become more accurate when I remember to blip the throttle before each downshift.

According to the following web link FAQ's the Acumen warranty is for only 6 months, which doesn't exactly inspire much confidence.

Maybe I'm just crazy (well, OK, I am...) but I'd be curious to know if there might be a statistically significant correlation in terms of the color of the Acumen's LED display (i.e., red vs. blue) and the rate of failures due to poor construction (particularly water resistance) of the unit's housing or box? You know, what if the blue display 'part' (or v v) might have some kind of poor fit into the overall housing compared to the red 'part'? Just a thought.

At any rate, it's sure sounding like at least some of these units may not be very water resistant, but that said I can only repeat that so far, I've been happy with my Acumen, and at this time I do not at all regret my purchase, but only time will tell. YMMV.

 

already ordered it and received it, it is part of my huge pile of installs I am currently going thru

I do wish the "glass" part of the top had a bit of a lip to it so you could flush mount it into the dash rather than be stuck having to surface mount it.

 

Ahh crap, really? I had planned to mount mine to the guage cluster, below the tach, on the left hand side of the peak. Figured that it would look the most natural there. Didn't even think about the clearence of the bars, so how bad was it? and do you have the stock bars? did you look at putting the unit fully on the flat part (which would necessitate drilling a hole for the cable) or just hanging it from the bottom to provide clearance for the cable? Unfortunately I can't test mine since the bars are off to rebuild the forks and I already have the dasboard off anyway to facilitate the installation of this and some other items...

 

Sorry to hear that, since I have one waiting to be installed, but have you tried contacting Acumen directly rather than just the US distributer? Acumen might be more interested in helping you out, or seeing what happened to yours. Maybe not, but seems like it would be worth a short email to them to find out.

 

I have my acumen ready to install, i had the wrong plug and play, sent back the vfr one has just arrived so ill install shortly, will post pics when done.

 

Don't keep us hanging Rapisdy, let us know how the install goes. Also, let me know how difficult it is to program. TIA

 

Hey Mav

i will probably get my mate to do it or the workshop, i don't think i can trust myself

 

How much are these things costing? I know I could look it up myself but I'm a fat, lazy American and want someone to just tell me so I don't have to expend extra keystrokes to learn the answer myself...

 

About $129. +\- $20.

 

:smile:
lol

 

In case anybody wants to install cheap chinease gear indicator to 6th gen VFR here is the needed wiring from instrument panel connector. Got mine working according to those.