A YouTuber called Berm Peak built functional wireless brakes for a fat tire mountain bike using ESP32 microcontrollers, car door lock actuators, and stock caliper springs. No hydraulic lines, no cables.
Getting the actuators to produce usable braking force required three rounds of hardware revision: swapping to higher-quality calipers, steepening the actuator angle, and extending the lever arm. The result is a central control unit with a display managing independent front and rear brake outputs.
The real argument for reading the full piece is not the build itself but what it enables. Berm Peak implemented ABS, a programmable brake curve equalizer tied to lever position, a dead-zone mode called 'derp' that ignores input below a set threshold, and remote brake authority over a child's bike. Those are features no hydraulic system can offer. The engineering decisions that made each one possible are documented in the video and worth the hour.
[READ ORIGINAL →]