Computrainer Update

Edit: Breaking news 20th October - I now have it coded into Golden Cheetah. The gui is a basic set of LCD numbers (rather like the display on a Garmin 705 in fact). Next steps are to add saving data to disk and a real-time scrolling graph!

To explain the video I start Golden Cheetah, show some of the features then start a realtime session, get on my bike, ride stop and then get back to my PC and stop the session. The 5 numbers are power, cadence, heartate, speed and load. I start with a load of 100w and then you will see it go up to 200w or so and then back down again. I am controlling this using the +/- keys on the unit.

Edit: Breaking news 11th October - I now have outbound control and inbound telemetry working . I can sit on my turbo and set load up and down with the +/- keys and watch watts cadence et al. Its all very ghetto, with just a console mode, but I can now set about turning it into something pretty with graphs etc.

For those of you that are interested I have opened up a sourceforge project to host my documentation and a sample utility to implement the key features. I've put the first draft of my documentation there for now, over the coming weeks I'll drop some code in there too.

Obviously my longer term goal is to put a real-time mode into Golden Cheetah. I'm making pretty good progress towards my goal of having something usable by 2010... Even if I have been tempted to take it apart in an attempt to 'understand it better' :-)

The above was taken in an attempt to work out what chips it uses to try and understand some of the bizarre memory structures.

And this little lad helped me along the way. Bless him, he is more than happy to sit and churn over the gears to help his old man. I'm sure that'll change over the next few years - so I'd better enjoy it whilst I can!

I can now read telemetry and set load on my CT. I haven't sorted out spin-scan or LTA etc. But frankly they're gimmicks. Still reckon that I'll get the Computrainer working on my Macbook before 2010.

I needed help generating load whilst I fiddled with my software ... above is a picture of my guineau pig in action.

Thanks Oli!

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