Favero has decided to give all of its Pro RS & Pro MX power meter pedal users a bit of a Valentine’s Day present, more than doubling of their battery life via a simple firmware update. The process takes a mere 3 minutes, and increases the claimed battery life from 60 hours to 160 hours. I could write a bunch more words, but frankly, it’s as simple as that.
You’ll update the Favero App first, if you haven’t done so, and then connect to your pedals. The process took about 3 minutes and 20 seconds for me to complete:
At the end of which, it’ll ask to do a simple calibration (just leave the crank arm vertical for a few seconds), and you’re done. New battery levels unlocked.
Now, I was curious as to whether or not this impacted transmission range/signal strength. So before I did that, I actually measured the signal strength of the Favero pedals in two spots. First, at my handlebars on a mount, and second, directly atop the right pedal itself (which is the pedal that transmits onwards to your bike computer). In this case, signal strength was measured via Bluetooth, as I didn’t have handy my ANT+ signal strength measuring unit.
Before handlebars: -65dBm
After handlebars: -65dBmBefore at pedal: -36dBm
After at pedal: -35dBm
A value of -40 is basically considered very good, and the lower the value (e.g., -65) indicates further away. Either way, all of these values are great, and indicate effectively no meaningful change. And while I haven’t validated the ANT+ signal strength, generally speaking those two are in tandem off the same chipset.
The reason why signal strength matters in battery tweaking exercises, it can and has absolutely broken some power meters. One only need to remember 4iiii a few years back, trying to dramatically increase their battery claims, only to have endless issues with power meter dropouts on people’s bike computers, because they pushed the limits too far. Signal strength is a big piece of the battery puzzle on these sorts of units, but it’s also a careful balance.
Of course, it’s not the only piece – the other aspects would be (and obviously is) code changes, designed to optimize performance. This can include cleaning up legacy code, cleaning up inefficient ways of doing things, etc… As is always the case when we see these massive battery jumps, we’ll have to wait to see if there are any unintended consequences across not just one or two people, but the population at large.
Favero said in a statement that: “This improvement has been made possible through extensive research and development to optimize the algorithm, ensuring extended battery life without compromising the high accuracy and consistency of data that our products are known for.”
The underlining was included in their quote. Had they really thought it through, for Valentine’s day they’d also have made that text red too. 😂
Historically speaking, Favero is *very* conservative when it comes to making adjustments and rolling out new hardware/software. I’d struggle to think of any company in the field that spends as much time as Favero on the testing side, save perhaps SRAM. Both are known for final validation programs that extend almost as long as some of their competitors’ entire development cycles.
In any case, go give it a whirl and let me know how it goes in the comments. While Favero already won most people’s money compared to Garmin’s Rally units (based mostly just on price), the battery was one of the last items on the comparison sheet where Favero was ‘losing’ from a technical standpoint (Rally x10 series is at 90 hours). That piece of the puzzle is solved, with the only thing on the comparison sheet left for Favero is to come out with a Look pedal option for their Pro series.
Either way, I’ve bought a number of Favero Pro RS & MX series units over the last year to use as power meter comparison pedals for both myself and my wife’s bikes, given the price point is great, and the just-works factor is high.
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It’s awfully nice of Favero to apply that new algorithm to their current devices (that were already really popular). Plenty of other companies would have kept it in their back pocket for their next hardware release.
What a fantastic company.
Favero forever!
Something is not working for me. The Favero app is at the latest version and the pedals are on version 5.77. When I go to the firmware update page it tells me I need to go to version 6.18 to get the latest features. So, I click “Check for Updates” and it says that I am already on the latest version. Is there a phased rollout or something?
What does your app store version show? On iOS for me it shows 4.0.31.571 (and was pushed 23 hours ago).
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Reads as if the update mechanism serving your phone (Apple or Google?) isn’t considering the phone compatible with more recent versions of the Favero app than the one you have. If your phone isn’t old, perhaps you are running with settings on the more adventurous side of things? Custom app stores, tweaks to keep some other app from updating, general auto-update distrust, something like that?
Hooking up device updates to those smartphone update mechanism is certainly convenient and reliable for most, but not without it’s downsides. Like most things it’s a trade-off.
To be clear, a slightly older version is actually fine (validated that myself), but I’m not sure what the definition of “slightly” is here.
I am on the app version 4.0.31.471. The app itself and the App Store both say so. On iOS 26.3. The app display the older, installed version, on the pedals, takes about updating to 6.18. And then says I am up to date. I guess I’ll just wait and see if anything changes. Everything else in the app seems to work correctly.
I just wish they added find my support :( and understand why the coin cell operated 4iii do and these don’t, Maybe next year’s valentine day gift?
That is great, they are simply the best option if you want powermeter pedals. I have them on all my bikes with Hope cranks, because I don’t know any spider powermeters for Hope, and I’m working on completing the full colour circle of Hope components. So I will probably end up with more than the actual 4 pairs of MX-2. Yes, I know that it is easy to swap them from bike to bike, still too much hassle.
It’s cool that we got this firmware update. I ran into a problem though. The pedals are fully charged, and I did the firmware update. There were no errors during installation on either pedal. When the app said to perform a Calibration, it failed. The bike is on the ground, standing straight up, and the pedals are in the 12 and 6 positions. The Favero app is up to date, and the calibration has failed several times now. I am submitting a ticket to Favero. I just wanted to post here so folks can assess the risks.
I only saw this on an extra set I tried to do off-bike (and after a few goes, went – I’ll properly calibrate them once I mount them to a bike).
For the bike on the ground, were you hand-holding it, or static against wall/etc?
Shane (GPLama) in his video suggests spinning the cranks a few times, then do the calibration.
Hey Ray, I have an older version of the Assioma Duo, will the new update apply to me as well?
Thanks.
No, only the newer ‘Pro’ series units, which are basically an entirely different hardware spindle/design.
The nrf52 that’s consuming the energy is mostly the same though. Most new releases by Nordic since that concurrent ANT+/BLE revolution that went through the market about the time Assioma replaced Bepro have been about adding more capabilities (more than needed in a fitness sensor), not about less power consumption.
Big runtime improvements like this are usually not about finding some sampling or broadcast compromise even more on the edge, they are about identifying yet another chip area to power down, or perhaps even more likely fixing a bug about powering down something you thought already was.
So on the level of technology, I’d actually be not surprised at all if the improvement could be backported. Wether they’ll actually try of course is an entirely different question.
Comparing the changelog of Pro and OG it looks as if until now all previous fixes on Pro eventually did end up on OG (not the platform offset feature), but with an ever increasing latency. The last backported fix arrived long after Pro RS was released, but that original fix was from before RS, when Pro was still MX only. So that backport might have been started before the RS release.
From a sales tactics point of view, I’d say an update for OG would cannibalize less Pro sales than the additional sales the status of being absolute long term support legends would bring. But that’s certainly just me wishing to see my OG become more awesome (I run both). From a textbook business perspective, if engineers wanted to do the backport but needed arguments to convince management, they could argue that at this time, Assioma OG is still a current offering, for those who prefer Keo.
(PS: revisiting this post I think that it might read as if I was expecting the upgrade to happen. That’s not what I’ve been trying to say. Just that it’s not quite as unlikely as one might expect)
Yesterday I took my MTB out of hibernation and charged the AXS battery and MX-2s. Just in case, I checked for firmware updates and applied 7.11 for the pedals without knowing what it brings. Turns out it was this :). So the update was served at least since yesterday, February 13th.
Very cool update. On an other side note, I have not been able to change the pedal bodies on the app when I’ve physically changed from pedal bodies( mx2 to Rs2) when I go through all the app stuff it says it’s changed but then still so mx. Was hoping the update would of fixed this
Yeah, Garmin is the same there. Not aware of any way to toggle the body/imagery different. :-/
any hints you can give us on when the rumored garmin cirqa will be released?
Q: can the ‘battery life extension” feature be disabled ? I’m happy with the current battery life so even if the downsides were really minimal I’d rather not really lose anything in other terms
There are no known downsides… They probably fixed something that was accidentally consuming too much power, or rewrote the calculation algorithm in a way that is much more power efficient while keeping identical output.
As David says, there’s zero (known) downside to this update whatsoever. Obviously it’s early days, but both Ray and other reliable reviewers (e.g. GP Lama) have found absolutely nothing adverse to report so far.
I don’t think you’re obliged to update the firmware. If you’re happy with how things are, you can just never update the firmware again. But there’s no way to keep the firmware up-to-date with any other changes, whilst “opting out” of the specific battery life improvement changes.
As well as being convenient, I would flag that longer battery life = fewer charge cycles = less battery degradation. So opting out means you’re going to degrade your battery faster and need to replace them sooner, which is obviously expensive.
I have the “old” Assioma Duo since 2020 over 100thousand kilometers on it.
I haven’t noticed any battery weaknesses whatsoever, not even in the current sub-zero temperatures in Europe.
Yeah. I think my old type Duo batteries are going to die from old age before they do from charge cycles. I have other PMs on other bikes so these get charged maybe only every two or three months. Li-ion batteries deteriorate over time even with optimal use and storage.
exactly: “known” downsides. Since the updates is new I would be surprised if anyone already knew about them.
Sorry mate but ‘probably fixed something’ is not what I call a ‘technical explanation’.
what i’ve asked is different Tim. Obviously i can stay with the old firmware but what I wanted to know was if the battery extension was somehow optional even by updating the firmware since there are no details on how it was achieved and a 150% increase I doubt it is just ‘optimization.’
Know i know it can’t be disabled
If this was a small improvement, something like adding 25h to barely inch past Garmin Rally runtime, then I might share your scepticism. Could be a combination of questionable marginal gains tradeoffs carefully balanced to make it past the goalpost with little impact.
But a huge jump like this, no way this could be achieved by sacrificing a little safety margin here and there. They discovered an unused “room” on the chip where the light was always burning and turned it off (likely thought that it had been off before, but were mistaken about that). Plugged a hole where energy was draining for no benefit at all.
If anything, if they did have a few tradeoff optimizations before, they might have toned them down after discovering this unexpected energy saving. Nobody would complain if they only extended to, say, 120h because they used some of the “free energy” for increasing sample rate or broadcast power. In fact we don’t know, this might be exactly what happened, perhaps the improvement could have been going to 180h but they preferred to tone down some existing compromises instead.
I could agree if this was their first power meter but a 150% improvement means that on your first attempt you made a huge mistake.
However, they have not shared anything technical so every hypothesis is plausible
Those chips that powermeters are using (pretty much the same across all manufacturers, and also across all other fitness sensors), they could drain the battery in minutes without clever power saving techniques. Almost all capabilities of these chips are shut down almost all the time, and most of them the entire time. But when a part that you think you shut down isn’t, there’s no way to know except for seeing a runtime not as good as the one you’d have if the shutdown went as intended. When some small part of shutting down fails, it’s very likely that you would not notice and just think “this is how good runtime will get”. Did anyone consider the 60h runtime the pedals had before a sign of failure? Not me at least. Sure, Garmin lasted a little longer, but is that because of a bigger battery, because of a more successful shutdown configuration or maybe because the algorithm leans to the side of runtime over accuracy whenever there’s a trade-off possibility? Nobody knows. It’s well possible that Garmin has the exact same shutdown imperfection (on what I think is their fifth generation of powermeter pedals?) in their code and who knows, maybe they could extend their runtime to 200h if only Favero devs would drop some clues. (But knowing Garmin, they’d keep the improvement to the next generation – not because they are evil but because they have trained their audience to expect a new generation every few years and they desperately need some headline features when incrementing the generation number)
I happened to see an update for the app that had been pushed out on 13 February. After doing that, I updated my pedals without issue. Today, I had the first chance to see some data and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. So, right now, it all works well.
Man wish they had a long q factor version like my old duo shis. I’m 6’6″ with size 13 shoes and end up scuffing my cranks and chainstay with my shoes without the extra width.
Installed the firmware and tried to wake my pedals up for a Zwift workout. It seems like the pedals don’t fully wake up until you push 100 watts on them. I tried pairing them before pedaling and I was only getting readings from one pedal (while in dual pedal mode). 30watts…0watts…30watts…0watts.
It was only when I started putting power down that the right pedal woke up and the proper numbers came out as usual. The right pedals seem a little hesitant to output data but maybe that’s just me.
That’s odd. I wake up the pedals pretty easily (including on new firmware), just with a light reverse rotation of the crank arm once or twice. Usually just with my hand or a rotation of the pedals backwards with my foot (not even on the bike/trainer yet). So well under 100w.
I wish this applied to the duo shi which I’m pigeonholed into using because I have size 13 cycling shoes. I’d get the newer one if I could use pedal extenders. I have sorts of scuffs on my cranks and frame from my older duos looks from shoe overlap and float.