I want to get more intentional about my fitness and measuring my performance and whatnot. As such, I’m in the market for fitness tracking technology for the first time.
However, I’m very much a Free Software / self-hosted sort of person, and I’m very un-thrilled about how proprietary all this stuff seems. It looks like the sensors themselves are kind of standardized (“ant+”, whatever that is), and some of the data formats can be imported and exported, but the bike computers themselves and the companion apps and the online services appear to be trying to become walled gardens.
Short of building a bike computer from components myself, what hardware and software should I be looking into?
Edit: my most immediate concern is figuring out what bike computer to get, to be able to log data from the ANT+ speed, cadence, and heart rate sensors I’ve already bought (along with a GPS track). I’m considering anything from a Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt V3 ($300), to an off-brand(?) one like a Magene C506 ($100) or iGPSSport BSC100S ($38), to using my smartphone with an ANT+ dongle and the “A Training Tracker” app (Github, Play Store).
I have enjoyed RideWithGPS. There are various tiers, and the free tier gets you a lot of features you might be looking for with the paid tiers providing more features related to route planning. It can be integrated with computers (I now use a wahoo) or run from a phone in your jersey pocket. It can connect with other services like Strava if you want to share your ride data there. Routes can be imported/exported in a variety of formats and I believe other sensors like heart rate / power / cadence can be added in, but I don’t personally use those so don’t take my word on that.
Good luck
Are there major differences in bike computer brands re: compatibility with third-party services and devices, or does everything just support standards? I get the impression that Wahoo and Garmin are the most prominent brands, but does that translate into “ecosystem” advantages?
My understanding is that most of the major brands of computers will integrate with most ride planning / tracking apps pretty easily.
Here’s what I use:
Flow = Plan route in RWGPS (desktop or mobile) --> Send to Wahoo Device --> Start ride on Wahoo Device (pick route or just go) --> end ride on computer --> sync to wahoo app --> auto-syncs with Klimat / RWGPS / Strava --> manually add photos, descriptions, or whatever in RWGPS or Strava.
Obviously not all of that is necessary, and I don’t do that for even half my rides. I’m pretty sure something else could add weather info to my ride reports, but whatever…Klimat is $5/yr and I already have it set-up.
I don’t have a ton of experience with different bike computer brands as I basically went from using a phone on my rides to getting a Wahoo at Christmas one year. Other major brands in the computer space are Garmin, Coros, and Hammerhead.
I personally switched away from phone-only as I ride in a lot of places without cell service and I found I was using up my phone battery while riding to the point I couldn’t use my phone for making phone calls.
Wahoo also has two of their own apps - one I’ve never figured out (Element) but I think is used more for like live ride-tracking, like if i wanted to share my location, speed, distance, etc with you during a ride. The other is the Wahoo app, which I can use to import routes and it shows me some basic ride data after my rides. This app also has a lot of training features which it sounds like you might be more interested in. For instance it’ll ask me to rate my effort after a ride, then use that combined with ride time and other metrics to “score” my ride. It’ll also recommend workouts. As someone who just “rode my bike” this takes a little bit of getting used to. It’ll tell you when you’re rides aren’t really doing much for your progress (e.g. doing the same 20mile ride everyday may not be helping you build endurance or get better at hills) or it may tell you that you need to back off and take a rest day. Of course like most apps in this space they want you to pay extra for a subscription service that unlocks even more. I just use the unpaid tier in this app. I believe Garmin and Wahoo are probably the strongest in this sense…I don’t doubt that Coros and Hammerhead make good computers but I haven’t heard anything about the app support that comes with them.
One thing I have heard (which I don’t have yet) is that a chest strap heart rate monitor is going to give you a lot better body metrics than the computer will guess at or a smart watch bouncing around on your wrist might be able to provide. These can be pretty reasonably priced as well. Power meters can provide a lot of other metrics, but the price of those doesn’t match my interest level in that data.
I personally found Strava’s environment to be too locked down in terms of planning/sharing route info, and I have no rider friends so the social media aspect that they’re big on kind of does nothing for me. I still have it as it’s the app I first started with and my rides sync to it automatically, but I mostly use it to get discount codes from completing challenges now. And there’s a couple local people who have a group that I follow and they publish a variety of routes in my state. I basically hid myself away on that app (profile is mostly private, I turned off the local legend stuff, and I don’t allow people to see where I start/end my rides, what times I’m riding etc)
There’s certainly a lot of choices and it can be kind of a pain to get it all configured to talk to each other ( and like I alluded to with Klimat, I’m not eager to go changing my setup now that I’ve got things working the way I like). It’s also easy to get lost in chasing the “is this ride improving my performance” trap. If training is your interest and you’re genuinely wanting to see stats improving all that can help and more power to you. But if you also like riding your bike for fun, mental health, getting into nature, etc. remember that it’s ok to skip all the data and just have a ride that puts a smile on your face too.