I want to get more intentional about my fitness and measuring my performance and whatnot. As such, I’m in the market for fitness tracking technology for the first time.

However, I’m very much a Free Software / self-hosted sort of person, and I’m very un-thrilled about how proprietary all this stuff seems. It looks like the sensors themselves are kind of standardized (“ant+”, whatever that is), and some of the data formats can be imported and exported, but the bike computers themselves and the companion apps and the online services appear to be trying to become walled gardens.

Short of building a bike computer from components myself, what hardware and software should I be looking into?

Edit: my most immediate concern is figuring out what bike computer to get, to be able to log data from the ANT+ speed, cadence, and heart rate sensors I’ve already bought (along with a GPS track). I’m considering anything from a Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt V3 ($300), to an off-brand(?) one like a Magene C506 ($100) or iGPSSport BSC100S ($38), to using my smartphone with an ANT+ dongle and the “A Training Tracker” app (Github, Play Store).

  • grueOPEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    I’ve been leaning towards the iGPSport computers, but I’ve been having a hard time choosing between the different models (especially since they seem to be divided into two product lines, between the BSC ones and the BiNavi ones). Do you have any advice about that?

    Since I’ve never used a bike computer before, I’m not entirely sure which features are important/worth paying more for.

    • smaland@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Well, I deliberately chose the cheapest one available because my requirements were very minimal - I wanted to be able to put a GPX file on it so that it can draw a line on a screen. No maps, no colors, I just don’t want to navigate with my phone. The BSC200 is alright for that.

      One thing that’s not great about it is that it often gets confused as to what direction you’re going - if you select a route that goes somewhere and back, it will occasionally think that you’re on the way back and give you the opposite directions - despite “knowing” that you’re only 10km into a 120km route. It works best when your route doesn’t overlap with itself.

      One feature that I found myself to be oddly missing has to do with the elevation map - it can show you the history of your elevation as a nice little graph, but it can’t tell you where the nearest climb is, how log/steep it is etc. Knowing the history of your climbing is much less interesting, and the data is there in the GPX file, just not utilized. If I was looking for a bike computer now, that’s something I’d take note of.

      That said, I paid about about 30€ for this one (not 20 I originally claimed - I checked and apparently I only paid 20 in my head :)). Knowing what I know now, and with how much use I’m getting of it, I’d be happy to pay 50 or 60 for something slightly better, but not more than that. It does the job, it’s good enough for who it’s for, it’s never going to be perfect anyway and I have better ways to spend a garmin of money on.

    • LovesTha🥧@floss.social
      2·
      6 days ago

      @grue @smaland As I’m interested too, the features on the BiNavi appear to be:
      * Larger screen +touch.
      * Extra GPS frequency. This gives better accuracy particularly when in urban/city areas.
      * Rerouting w/o Internet access. Nota big deal unless you want navigation in countries that you don’t have mobile data. Rerouting in areas without mobile coverage is less useful, there tends to be less route options in general, so when you miss a turn you just go back to the turn.
      * Fancy Di2 control.