SubscribeIn this blog post we’re looking at the Wahoo Fitness ANT+ Bike Pack with Bike Case and Speed / Cadence Sensor for iPod touch and iPhone.
The kit comes, as you’d expect, with an ANT+ dual speed/cadence sensor to attach to your bike and the Wahoo Fitness iPhone case and handlebar mount.
The ANT+ sensors attach to the bike quickly and easily with supplied zip ties. Note that there are small zipties in the packaging for the sensor and large zipties for the handlebar mount for the case. If like me you’re a bit clutsy, you may want to have a few extra zipties around of both sizes, so you can tweak the setup after you’ve done it wrong. Don’t get me wrong, its super easy to do right – but I was in a hurry, attaching it in a light rain and of course spent more time tinkering with it because I was rushing. Typical. 🙂
The case is rugged. Seriously! I’m not sure if it’s water proof but it is certainly very water resistant. I don’t have the ability (read: budget) to test water proof-ness, but I bet it’d survive a drop in a puddle or a good rain.
With the extra space at the bottom where the Wahoo fitness electronics are located, the whole package is reminiscent of the old Apple Newton (remember those) in size and weight. Yea, this case is not really meant for dropping the phone in your pocket day-to-day. The case attaches to the handlebars with a very solid bayonette mount and though the mount is bombproof, installing and removing the case from the mount is very easy and quick. Definitely a well thought-out design.
I think the biggest “problem” with this product (and really it isn’t a problem at all) is that there is SO much software out there that leverages the hardware combination of the iPhone and Wahoo fitness ANT+ dongle. There are run apps, cycling apps, mapping apps, social apps. Literally pages and pages of applications. You could probably do a year of workouts and only use each app once or twice. It’s kind of nutty, but it speaks to the power and desirability of this solution. The apps wouldn’t exist if there weren’t users 😉 One of the apps: the actual Wahoo Fitness app (and I’m sure others) will upload your workouts to multiple social/training sites simultaneously for you (dailymile, strava, runkeeper, trainingpeaks, etc. all updated directly from the app with little or no interaction required. Now that’s cool!)
One app idea that occurred to me, that surprisingly, doesn’t seem to exist is something like SRMlive: live updates of athlete performance and gps location sent to a web service in real-time so that friends, family and coaches could see how the athlete is performing, where they are, etc. 2 extensions of this idea are: real-time coaching feedback (“I told you to hold back – what are you doing pushing 800w on that segment!”), and a “call for help/panic button” feature where the athlete could pre-configure who to contact and how and the phone could detect sudden and extended stops or, using the accelerometer maybe even crashes, and call for help. These apps don’t seem to exist, but someone should fix that 😉
Using the Wahoo fitness system is pretty much as simple as it can be. You pair the ANT+ devices with the software and away you go. It’s flawless in its’ simplicity. I did have one small glitch with the solution, but figuring it out it was simple to avoid: if you have multiple apps running that are competing for access to the Wahoo fitness interface, none of them works well. The, obvious, easy solution, is to make sure that only 1 app is running at a time. Even better, find your favorite app and delete the others from your phone for bulletproof operation.
I now understand why so many people like or love the Wahoo fitness solutions (either the full case or just the ANT+ adapter). If you have an iPhone 3 or 4 and you train with ANT+ devices you really should checkout this solution. If you already have the phone, then you can skip the costs of a specialized watch and just pickup the appropriate sensors for what you’re doing and use the Wahoo hardware and your phone for data capture/reporting. A pretty elegant solution, esp if you already carry your phone with you for music/emergencies.
One caveat, at the time of this writing, Wahoo Fitness does not have a solution to work with the iPhone 5. If you’re planning the upgrade you may find yourself out in the cold for a bit while Wahoo gets an iPhone5 solution out.
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