Bluetooth FTMS support?
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Hello,
I know Garmin has support for Bluetooth FTMS treadmills, bikes, elliptical, or rowing machines. It seems that Amazfit is also adding FTMS support to their watches.
This is interesting because in a treadmill you can have the real speed/slope synced with your watch. It’s one of the reasons that people buy FTMS treadmills for things like Zwift.
Has anybody experience with Suunto with FTMS?
Thanks
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@dreamer_ said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
Hello,
I know Garmin has support for Bluetooth FTMS treadmills, bikes, elliptical, or rowing machines. It seems that Amazfit is also adding FTMS support to their watches.
This is interesting because in a treadmill you can have the real speed/slope synced with your watch. It’s one of the reasons that people buy FTMS treadmills for things like Zwift.
Has anybody experience with Suunto with FTMS?
Thanks
I don’t think that’s true for Garmin? Garmin has ANT+ FE-C support for somethings, but not bluetooth FTMS, particularly for rowing machines.
https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=rlynVxyyoq9dcSZGw5YFo8
“ Some Garmin watches have the ability to connect to an indoor rowing machine that supports ANT+ connectivity. Compatible watches may include data fields in the Row Indoor activity profile such as Distance, Pace, Power, and Stroke Distance.”
Some Coros watches can connect to a rower by bluetooth FTMS though.
For the Wahoo KICKR Run treadmill, my understanding is Garmin also uses ANT+ there, and Wahoo/Coros are working on a special bluetooth protocol there such that Coros will not use FTMS either, but FTMS does exist on the Run and can be used say in Zwift.
Can you show a resource that tells which Garmin watches can take a bluetooth FTMS connection to a gym machine of any kind?
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@raven said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
@dreamer_ said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
Hello,
I know Garmin has support for Bluetooth FTMS treadmills, bikes, elliptical, or rowing machines. It seems that Amazfit is also adding FTMS support to their watches.
This is interesting because in a treadmill you can have the real speed/slope synced with your watch. It’s one of the reasons that people buy FTMS treadmills for things like Zwift.
Has anybody experience with Suunto with FTMS?
Thanks
I don’t think that’s true for Garmin? Garmin has ANT+ FE-C support for somethings, but not bluetooth FTMS, particularly for rowing machines.
https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=rlynVxyyoq9dcSZGw5YFo8
“ Some Garmin watches have the ability to connect to an indoor rowing machine that supports ANT+ connectivity. Compatible watches may include data fields in the Row Indoor activity profile such as Distance, Pace, Power, and Stroke Distance.”
Some Coros watches can connect to a rower by bluetooth FTMS though.
For the Wahoo KICKR Run treadmill, my understanding is Garmin also uses ANT+ there, and Wahoo/Coros are working on a special bluetooth protocol there such that Coros will not use FTMS either, but FTMS does exist on the Run and can be used say in Zwift.
Can you show a resource that tells which Garmin watches can take a bluetooth FTMS connection to a gym machine of any kind?
Support is through connectIQ. I.E: https://apps.garmin.com/es-ES/apps/bc6d8a92-0216-42c9-b422-32183ceb00b8
There are several apps.
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@dreamer_ said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
@raven said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
@dreamer_ said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
Hello,
I know Garmin has support for Bluetooth FTMS treadmills, bikes, elliptical, or rowing machines. It seems that Amazfit is also adding FTMS support to their watches.
This is interesting because in a treadmill you can have the real speed/slope synced with your watch. It’s one of the reasons that people buy FTMS treadmills for things like Zwift.
Has anybody experience with Suunto with FTMS?
Thanks
I don’t think that’s true for Garmin? Garmin has ANT+ FE-C support for somethings, but not bluetooth FTMS, particularly for rowing machines.
https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=rlynVxyyoq9dcSZGw5YFo8
“ Some Garmin watches have the ability to connect to an indoor rowing machine that supports ANT+ connectivity. Compatible watches may include data fields in the Row Indoor activity profile such as Distance, Pace, Power, and Stroke Distance.”
Some Coros watches can connect to a rower by bluetooth FTMS though.
For the Wahoo KICKR Run treadmill, my understanding is Garmin also uses ANT+ there, and Wahoo/Coros are working on a special bluetooth protocol there such that Coros will not use FTMS either, but FTMS does exist on the Run and can be used say in Zwift.
Can you show a resource that tells which Garmin watches can take a bluetooth FTMS connection to a gym machine of any kind?
Support is through connectIQ. I.E: https://apps.garmin.com/es-ES/apps/bc6d8a92-0216-42c9-b422-32183ceb00b8
There are several apps.
Isn’t that like SuuntoPlus? Someone has a Concept2 connection to Sunnto that way.
https://forum.suunto.com/topic/5967/suunto-and-concept-2-indoor-rowing
I don’t consider either that or ConnectIQ a real native solution though. It’s like an Apple person getting additional apps to use for fitness tracking when they aren’t satisfied with what Apple provides in their own apps. It’s fine but not the same as the company doing it properly themselves.
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@raven it’s not native, it’s somehow like using S+ . But the thing is that it works and that’s the key.
Amazfit also added native FTMS support for rowing machines and it’s very likely they are adding support for the rest types.I think this is very interesting and should be looked at. Perhaps through S+ .
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@dreamer_ said in Bluetooth FTMS support?:
@raven it’s not native, it’s somehow like using S+ . But the thing is that it works and that’s the key.
Amazfit also added native FTMS support for rowing machines and it’s very likely they are adding support for the rest types.I think this is very interesting and should be looked at. Perhaps through S+ .
The problem for me is for rowing there’s “infrastructure” I need in addition to bringing in the data. For example, I use a rowing FTP of 160w, and have established power zones. On a site like intervals.icu, I can look at my session in ways like “time in power zones,” which doesn’t work if the ecosystem doesn’t allow one to establish a rowing FTP separate from your cycling FTP. Currently what I do is use intervals.icu for my rowing analysis, then use the training load it determines for me and “backport” it to Suunto be changing my TSS manually.
While systems like ConnectIQ and SuuntoPlus can be useful, if Garmin and Suunto use that as an excuse to not have better native support for things, and there’s limitations because of this, then that’s suboptimal.
I concur a feature of using bluetooth FTMS to get data from gym machines is useful, and an area sports watches have largely ignored. I suspect it’s because they started as focusing on outdoor activities so dedicated GPS, etc has been the focus. Right now for rowing machines Suunto uses accelerometers to determine stroke count, which works decently and matches my system, then uses that to estimate distance, which overestimates for me by a large amount. And it cannot determine power this way of course, and can only guess at pace if it corresponds to cadence. However, something like “power strokes” at 300w (1:45/500m) at a low 20spm cadence, then more moderate 175w (2:06/500m) at a moderate 24spm cadence won’t ever be determined correctly without a connection to the machine.
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@raven this is very nice post.
My use case is the treadmill. Usually when you run on a treadmill you get a final constant pace in the watch. You cannot see the speed variations and/or slopes you had in the workout and that is not transmitted later to the application. The workaround is the foot pod (i.e Stryd) but even (the very expensive) Stryd fails.
If the watch is able to see the real speed (and speed changes) or the slope, that changes everything. Because that means real data, not an estimation (with manual changes or created by a foot pod).
