Heads up! Big sports tech sales have begun! Check out the massive list of everything, from 20%-30% off all smart trainers, to $200 off the Garmin FR945 LTE & $150 off the Edge 1030 Plus. Then $240 off Garmin’s Rally power meters (including MTB edition) and $200 off the Wahoo POWRLINK Zero Speedplay power meter. Plus deals on Varia Radar, rocker plates, more watches, action cams, drones, and more. Realistically the best deals we’ll see till November. Enjoy! Full and updated list here.
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
I swim, bike and run. Then, I come here and write about my adventures. It’s as simple as that. Most of the time. If you’re new around these parts, here’s the long version of my story.
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Smart Trainers Buyers Guide: Looking at a smart trainer this winter? I cover all the units to buy (and avoid) for indoor training. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
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I have built an extensive list of my most frequently asked questions. Below are the most popular.
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In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
Have some fun in the travel section.
I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.
My Photography Gear: The Cameras and Equipment I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds! It’s a nice break from the day to day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
Many readers stumble into my website in search of information on the latest and greatest sports tech products. But at the end of the day, you might just be wondering “What does Ray use when not testing new products?”. So here is the most up to date list of products I like and fit the bill for me and my training needs best! DC Rainmaker 2021 swim, bike, run, and general gear list. But wait, are you a female and feel like these things might not apply to you? If that’s the case (but certainly not saying my choices aren’t good for women), and you just want to see a different gear junkies “picks”, check out The Girl’s Gear Guide too.
This is so cool. I always learn something when I read your blogs. Keep up the great work.
Wow! Ray that is a completely awesome find. I’m definitely checking those sites out tomorrow morning as I watch the Tour. Thanks for the excellent write up.
Great article. Ant+ is getting everywhere! Great fun!
Ray – I would think battery power for the phones would be an issue. Running GPS, ANT+, with constant data streaming over the cell network for a 4-6 hour race must create a power issue no?
Hey Ray,
Great post. This is such fascinating stuff.
That is disgustingly awesome man. Like I am just in awe of where technology has been taking us.
Great post and review!!!
Knowing how cyclists always freak out about a few extra grams of weight on their bikes, I am surprised they were OK with having an extra gadget on board (which might be cool for spectators, but does nothing for riders).
The UCI rules require bicycles for road racing to have a minimum mass of 6.8 kg, so they generally carry ballast anyway.
I want an ANT+ droid iTouch.
Thx DCR,
I’m curious to know if these riders also run head-units on their bars, and what device that is? I see that the team is sponsored by SRM and Suunto, so these would be good guesses.
Mike
This is super cool. Imagine the advantage for a coach to be able to follow his pupil in real time from across the country.
This is absult fantastic…
I used a programm which gave my wife the possibility to see where i was biking used the gps in my htc hd2 and send the info to in a aplication on my home pc, but javing the powerdata etc on my pc possible to see for my wife or coach….
Do you have any idea if there is a link to the htc hd2 windows 6.5. For ant+….
would be great to have this well if not it could be a iphone…
marc
Hi All-
At the moment neither HTC nor ANT+ have dates for releasing the firmware update. However, I’ve been told that sending feedback to HTC would be highly useful in helping them to understand the demand for such firmware.
Thanks!
You said “an application called MyTracks runs on the phone and parses the data. Then in real-time, the data is uploaded” but My Tracks doesn’t upload data in real time. It archives to google servers afterwards but not live. There must be another version of My Tracks which does upload data in real time. Is it available?
First of all I would love to have an ANT+ in my Android phone.
One think that I wonder is regarding the firmware that enables the ANT+ functionality. If this is true that the hardware is there then it should be any problem for developers at XDA (www.xda-developers.com/) to enable it.
You can find the TDF MyTracks Code here:
link to code.google.com
We want to reproduce this using a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro handset on which we have successfully tested ANT plus communications.
Nils K advised that the version used was link to code.google.com
but when I look at this version it is documented as the sandordornbush-release and “I will use this to build release binary files from.”
It doesn’t look like it uploads data in real time. Nils are you confident this is the live update version?
I got an answer to my previous question from Sandordo, one of the Tour De France My Tracks developers. He advised the code is not available but provided some advice on how to do it.
Thanks for the follow-up Ken.
There are some other folks working on similiar efforts using the X10’s as well.
Obviously things have changed significantly from last summer in that the phones are now mainstream with ANT+ support on the Android side, and on the iPhoen side there’s more than 60+ apps that do it (including publishing via the Internet live).
At the moment though the Android side is pretty slim on apps that support ANT+ – but I think over time we’ll see that expand pretty quickly.
If you do develop something, feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you’re interseted in testing or the like. I have an X10.
I think a better system would be A Garmin Edge 500 or or other Garmin that pulled data from satellite and a car or desktop computer pulled exact data from satellite. So basically The Garmin on the bars would receive the data from the GPS Satellite and a computer could pull the data from the Device by its code identifier. So there would be no drain on battery. The computer in the car or desktop could be getting real time info and the bike rider could be getting the data that they need. No large battery , No second or third device.
I’d be keen for you do some testing of our newly released app Avocado My Tracks Bridge. It allows you to do live tracking of sports activities by extracting data from My Tracks and making it appear on MapMyTracks.com. We have done a lot of testing ourselves and some testing with athletes so we are confident it works well. I’m a lot less confident on useability issues, in particular how hard is to for a new user to set it up and use it? Some feedback on what we should change to make it easier would be useful. See some notes and instructions.
We followed Sandor’s advice but it turned out to be a lot more effort than expected. The interface for controlling MyTracks programmatically didn’t work anymore, and no one had noticed, indicating we are the only ones using it. We fixed that and you’ll notice that the My Tracks settings now has a check box to enable/disable third party apps to interact with MyTracks which the Google team added. I’m not sure this is ideal because its one more setting that has to be got right for everything to work. Also the Market description for My Tracks says it works with “- SRM power meters, speed, and cadence sensors” and even the latest version doesn’t connect to SRM Power meters with commercially available handsets. Google used a special in the 2010 Tour de France. MyTracks should be able to connect to SRM PCS7s in the next release as our code to fix this is currently under review. In the meantime to connect to SRM power meters you need this MyTracks version.
Please give it a go. Your X10 mini pro is the best handset we’ve tested thus far because the Xperia ARC (haven’t tested the new S) has a poor quality GPS.
I’d be keen for you do some testing of our newly released app Avocado My Tracks Bridge. It allows you to do live tracking of sports activities by extracting data from My Tracks and making it appear on MapMyTracks.com. We have done a lot of testing ourselves and some testing with athletes so we are confident it works well. I’m a lot less confident on useability issues, in particular how hard is to for a new user to set it up and use it? Some feedback on what we should change to make it easier would be useful. See some notes and instructions.
We followed Sandor’s advice but it turned out to be a lot more effort than expected. The interface for controlling MyTracks programmatically didn’t work anymore, and no one had noticed, indicating we are the only ones using it. We fixed that and you’ll notice that the My Tracks settings now has a check box to enable/disable third party apps to interact with MyTracks which the Google team added. I’m not sure this is ideal because its one more setting that has to be got right for everything to work. Also the Market description for My Tracks says it works with “- SRM power meters, speed, and cadence sensors” and even the latest version doesn’t connect to SRM Power meters with commercially available handsets. Google used a special in the 2010 Tour de France. MyTracks should be able to connect to SRM PCS7s in the next release as our code to fix this is currently under review. In the meantime to connect to SRM power meters you need this MyTracks version.
Please give it a go. Your X10 mini pro is the best handset we’ve tested thus far because the Xperia ARC (haven’t tested the new S) has a poor quality GPS.
HI,
Any info on getting rider’s data on this year’s Tour de France?
I have to see if the ruling stuck that prohibits the cell phone relay portion that went into effect over the past year.
Any updates since 2011? What would be the best way to enable live tracking using Android based ANT+ device this year!?
I’m a huge fan of the idea, live tracking in general, and actually managed to do this 2011 by myself, but the setup was totally different then (no ANT+) and if I remember right the output wasn’t complitely bug-free. Unfortunately cannot remember the Android software I was using anymore… Any suggestions? Btw. I’m using OPO now (ANT+ is enabled by default).
Basically UCI banned the solution shortly after 2011, and didn’t re-allow partial implementation of things until this year.
So, it’s not working today, or?
I’ve also tried Avocado Bridge but for some reason it keeps saying that access to MyTracks cannot be granted and please uninstall and reinstall etc – doesn’t want to work for me. Guess I have to rely on some paid apps & subscriptions, there’s some apps available at Google Play.
I don’t know if they use that exact solution anymore, or something else. :-/