Cycling Power Estimator

mickywickyftw

AKA the poor man’s power meter.
I’ve got something working and have field tested it a couple of times.
The physics of estimating cycling power are well understood, but there’s a lot of kinks to iron out, such as accel noise, barometer jumps, etc. which you wouldn’t notice just trying to read altitude from it.
It can run entirely without GPS if you have a speed sensor + barometer + compass. A cadence sensor really helps with accuracy.

I’ve made good progress on all this, there are 3 things left to address:

more work smoothing the readings mid-ride
further reduce latency
I can use the compass to read heading without GPS, but I cannot think of an easy solution to retrieving wind speed and heading before the ride without building a mobile companion app. Any alternatives? Sure we could ask the user to input those in the app settings each time… maybe I’ll do that for the first release.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@mickywickyftw said in Cycling Power Estimator:

I can use the compass to read heading without GPS, but I cannot think of an easy solution to retrieving wind speed and heading before the ride without building a mobile companion app. Any alternatives? Sure we could ask the user to input those in the app settings each time… maybe I’ll do that for the first release.

Are you using accelero or imu for the implementation?

For the wind etc, perhaps on v1 leave it out. Make a remark to the user etc. Wind wont be stable nor its so easy to predict in many areas so it might skew “for now reason” such a logic right ?

A strange idea: Putting the watch with the barometer facing the head of the bike you are going to get noise there that comes from wind but also depends on speed. So again it feels hard for me to be implemented.

Perhaps the person that did the live tracking here can answer better.