Patch pushed to Golden Cheetah

A 270k (!) patch to include this stuff in the Golden Cheetah codebase has been pushed across to Sean. Hopefully this will get released to the world soon. Really excited about it. In the meantime, here is a screenshot of it running on Linux. I wasn't pedalling at the time :-)

Computrainer on a Mac. Done.

Ride across America (and the Atlantic Ocean)

Wow. There is now a team of folks in the Golden Cheetah community developing some really cool and exciting new features. Justin in Montreal is getting ANT+ devices working so you can turn that tired old turbos or set of rollers into a Computrainer, I'm still mucking about with the Computrainer support and a few other odds and sods, and Steve in Seattle has the coup de grace, by adding a streaming server and support.

The video below is our first proof of concept with streaming workouts via a specially built server. In it you will see Steve's Mac, running Golden Cheetah but reading telemetry from his server. I'm in Cranleigh riding my socks off on my Computrainer and sending my data over the Atlantic and across to the West Coast of America.

As you can imagine, its all very exciting and we're already thinking of next steps, group rides, racing and who knows what else we can imagine. The killer here though is there is a lot of very, very clever folks working on this, including the project leader Sean in NYC, and two Gregs who between them have addded .3dp support to Golden Cheetah and are helping to test the code and provide veteran power training insight.

Watch the Golden Cheetah Google Group for more news, this is gonna be HUGE!

ANT+ Support!

Yep, we can now stream from any ANT+ device so Cinqos, SRM, Powertap and just about any of the new devices coming to market. Justin has done some awesome work as you'll see in the video below.

Latest Video of Computrainer on a Mac

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!

Ultremo carnage

Promised to upload some photos of the split and bulging Ultremos. Note these are two separate splits on the same tyre. From normal riding on French roads.

'nuff said, eh?