transimt cycling computer signal to computer

spunky182

hello everyone.im a student from portugal and in need to find out what is needed to transmit the data from your cycling computer to a real computer (in a support car for exp) and transmit it in real time for internet....anyone knows?
maybe via radio?

emotionless_softcore

bluetooth wheel sensors are available

spunky182

emotionless_softcore wrote:

bluetooth wheel sensors are available

but bluetooth cannot send instant message to a pc right?
and if it does it will be just for 100 meters.i wanna cover 100 km =$

Ollieda

For basic data - speed, miles, ave, max etc. GPS could be used on the bike (like garmin) and then this could be tracked by a following car, or stationary computer back home.

If you wanted more detail like power output then i would imagine you would need something like a powertap but with a send ability, I odn't know of one but it has to be possible. HTC had an upload to their website during TdF giving live data of all their riders.

Cleat Eastwood

long string+tin cans

markmod

To transmit the data you will need a data or g3 signal enabled device. Some smart phones offer apps that allow live data to be tracked on a pc with an Internet connection. More intensive data upload will require a dedicated system, you are talking powermeter and device for heart rate, cadence etc with radio telemetry to computer in chase car with receiver. This is going to be expensive, and you are now in the realms of pro cycling teams.

If any other forumites know any systems that are affordable, that would be of help then I'm sure that they will help

Biscuiteer

markmod is probably correct to say that a fancy smartphone with built in GPS offers the greatest chance of giving you an off-the-shelf solution. There might well be a cheap or free app out there already that takes the phone's gps data and publishes it to a website or tweets it. That will do you for speed and location data.

If you can't get a smartphone to do what you want and you're able to keep a support car very close to the cyclist, get a GPS/bluetooth device on the bike. That will send GPS data to a laptop in the support car. The laptop could then handle uploading data to the internet with a 3G dongle via a suitably written program.

If you're willing or able to get your hands dirty with electronics and programming, go and have a look at Arduino. That will form the core of your system, and to it you could attach a GPS shield, sensors for speed, cadence and HR, and a data-transfer module to handle getting the data off the bike. You can get specially designed modules to expand Arduino's capabilities - these are called 'shields' and there will be ones for data transfer to allow you to choose from Wi-Fi, GSM or ZigBee to get the data off the bike. If you can't attach everything you want to Arduino, then start looking at PIC or AVR microcontrollers to replace Arduino.

Is this a group project or something you're doing on your own?

markmod

I worry about a Bluetooth signal strength for this application in my opinion the signal won't be strong enough as Bluetooth is designed for close data transfer, your chase car maybe in danger of knocking you off to get close enough for realtime data transfer to be viable! wifi is perhaps a stronger carrier, but as Bicuiteer alludes to there is quite a bit of development to sort a definitive home made solution.

I am sure I saw a cyclist that was following the tour for charity that was using a solution to upload real time positioning and data from his bike to the web for followers on his website, posting on this forum somewhere??

schweiz

Each member of the Columbia HTC team in this years Tour de France had a HTC phone with the in-built GPS relaying their position, speed, cadence, power and heart rate so you could follow each rider's progress on each stage. The update rate was only 0.5-.25Hz or so and data did seem to drop out although that could have been caused by one of many things, I suspect it was the the phone losing the either the GPS signal or GPRS signal. Also I'm not sure how real-time it was either

How many channels and at what rate so you want to record/send the data? I work in the aircraft industry and any decent data-logger to give reliable data useful for engineering is very expensive and are usually wired from sensor to PC.

An ANT+ enabled cycle computer (e.g. Garmin Edge 605, 705, 500 or 800) will allow you to send data to a PC that has an ANT+ receiver plugged into it but I've not seen any software that allows real time PC-Analysis although I'm sure there must be something. Otherwise, the ANT+ spec is, I believe, open source so it would be possible to write a bespoke application. The Garmin can take samples at 1Hz but there is no way to have high-speed and low-speed channels.