Life in a Fixed Gear

Golden Cheetah: Better Zooming Edit and Twitter support

jknotzke — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:56:12 +0000

New Zooming in Ride Plot

Three new features to Golden Cheetah. The first is a MUCH improved zooming feature in the ride plot.

Golden Cheetah Scrolling and Zooming from mark liversedge on Vimeo.

New Manual Ride Editor

Ride EditorAlso added by Mark is a Ride Editor that allows you to manually edit out those nasty peaks or other outlaying data. This was one of our more requested features. Generally the philosophy is to not try to fix crappy input data but instead allows users to fix it themselves. Trying to fix crappy data is always problematic. So this feature fits in well with GC's generally philosophy regarding user data.

Tweet Your Ride

Finally, a little hack of a patch I create. You can now tweet your ride. After choosing which Metrics, GC will tell you the total length of your Tweet and when pressing “Tweet Ride” GC will send your chosen ride metrics with your message and add a #goldencheetah tag. This will allow others to search for GC users via Twitter.

Tweet your Ride

Calculating Power From Crank Based Powermeters.

jknotzke — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:37:22 +0000

In discussions with Mark Rages, Mark believes (and the more I think about

it, the more I agree with him) that the way in which we calculate power and

cadence is incorrect.

It isn’t so much in the way that we calculate watts and cadence per se,

but more in how we handle a cyclist _not_ pedaling.

The Inherent Problem with Crank based PM’s

The inherent problem with crank based PM’s is that it is impossible to

know when a user stopped pedaling. Crank based PM’s do not update when they

are not turning. The ANT+ chip does continue to send out data but when the

pedals are not turning, they send out unchanged data.

Right now, the code handles non pedaling with an arbitrary timeout. The

code in git works off 5 seconds. If there are no changes in the ANT message

regarding power/cad in 5 seconds, we assume the user stopped pedaling and

set power and cad to 0.

Garmin does something similar to this as does Cycleops. In the case of

realtime display you do not have much choice. But when the data is recorded,

you do.

The Proposed Solution

Mark believes that the best way to handle this situation is to “peek into

the future”. The idea is as follows:

1) If an ANT power message arrives and there is no change, discard it.

2) If an ANT power message arrives and there is a change, calculate the

average watts from the last time watts was written up to the current time

that the latest change was recorded and write that average.

Example:

10 Second Sample of Watts. Each comma delimited number is 1 second in

time.

What actually happened:

100, 1000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100

Average = 120

Current implementation of GE’s parser would see:

100, 1000, 1000, 1000, 1000, 1000, 1000, 0, 0, 100

Average = 620 watts

New Proposed Method: (1000+100) / 7) = 157.1

100, 1000, 157.1, 157.1, 157.1, 157.1, 157.1, 157.1, 157.1, 100

Average = 229.97

There is also the possibility of mixing up the solutions. Say anything over 5 seconds with no activity, zero it out. Anything less and use Mark Rages’s method.

The downside with timeouts is that they are arbitrary. The other problem how do you know the cyclist merely didn’t just do 1 rotation over 5 seconds ? Not likely, but possible. But given the chances of this happening, mixing both solutions might be best.

GE now supports PT

jknotzke — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:53:35 +0000

With the help of Gareth Coco and Jordan Vance were able to finally get Powertap data parsed. The current parser commited to git is now capable of parsing Powertap data.

Huge thanks to those two. All that is left is SRM meters.

Golden Embed GPS Released

jknotzke — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:43:39 +0000

For the past few weeks, I have been putzing around with Sparkfun’s Package Tracker: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8755 trying to get GPS and ANT+ data working together. The board, or shall I say the boot loader has been a real challenge. It’s very particular with how the SD card is formatted. I’m not entirely sure if it’s the board or card reader or if maybe it’s the SD card.

Nevertheless, after many hours and lots of swearing, Golden Embed GPS is now born. GEGPS adds GPS capabilities to GoldenEmbed. It also solves a small problem that Golden Embed exhibited, which was that it was impossible to know on what date the ride took place. With GPS, this can now be solved.

The board also contains the ability to log barometric pressure as well as temperature. The former of these two will be required for the “Chung on a Stick” Project: http://andyfroncioni.com/2010/03/the-chung-on-a-stick-project/

I still have to write the parser for this, but it shouldn’t take very long as all the hard work was done in GE’s parser.

The GoldenEmbed webpage has been updated: http://chomsky.shampoo.ca/goldenembed

GC Code Freeze Work on 1.4 starts now

jknotzke — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:49:20 +0000

Feature Freeze for GC 1.4 was called. As of April 13nth, no no new features will be accepted. Which means GC starts work on releasing version 1.4.

1.4 will include:

-pretty logos
- fit file format
- stacked view
- aerolab
- map view
- metrics
- metadata
- view and color config

GC is Stacked

jknotzke — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:25:39 +0000

Damien Grauser’s latest patch will allow users to see data in a stacked view:

Stacked Ride Plot

I think this will be a huge hit when it makes 1.4.

LTM Now Over the Top

jknotzke — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:36:16 +0000

Look at this screenshot. Incredible

LTM Version 3

With this latest incarnation, you can create your own layouts and save them. It has preset layouts for different types of grouped metrics. All of which are customizable.

I’ve been playing with this for a bit and it’s like it’s own application.

Brilliant! Totally Brilliant !

Golden Embed supports Speed and Cadence

jknotzke — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:24:34 +0000

With the help of Jim Ley, I added support to for dual cadence/speed sensors to Golden Embed.

The firmware will log your cadence and speed and the parser will add speed, distance and cadence to the .gc file for when you import into Golden Cheetah.

Golden Cheetah 1.3 Released

jknotzke — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:25:29 +0000

GoldenCheetah 1.3

Realtime Mode:

Graph data as you ride (Mark Liversedge, Justin Knotzke, Steve Gribble)

Charts:

Added Performance Manager (Eric Murray)
Added 3D Modeling (Mark Liversedge and Greg Steele)
Up to four y-axes on Ride Plot (Sean Rhea)
Option to show work instead of power in Critical Power Plot (Sean Rhea)

Intervals:

Configurable metrics for intervals (Sean Rhea)
Find peak powers and add to intervals (Mark Liversedge)
Highlight intervals in plots (Damien Grauser)

Device support:

Serial port support on Windows (Mark Liversedge)
Erase SRM memory without downloading (Sean Rhea)

Imports:

New ride import wizard (Mark Liversedge, Jamie Kimberley)
Support Computrainer 3dp file format (Greg Lonnon)
Support WKO v3 file format (Mark Liversedge)
Support files with Garmin “smart recording” (Greg Lonnon)
New GoldenCheetah (.gc) file format (Sean Rhea)

New/improved ride metrics:

Added Joe Friel’s Aerobic Decoupling (Sean Rhea)
Added training points system by running coach Jack Daniels (Sean Rhea)
Better elevation gain estimates (Sean Rhea)

Support for more languages:

French (Damien Grauser)
Japanese (Mitsukuni Sato, Keisuke Yamaguchi)

Other new features:

Group rides into seasons (Justin Knotzke)
Better ride calendar (Berend De Schouwer)
Ride list pop-up menu (Thomas Weichmann)

Lots of bug fixes by:

Rob Carlsen
Rainer Clasen
Chris Cleeland
Steve Gribble
Dag Gruneau
Ned Harding
Jamie Kimberley
Justin Knotzke
Mark Liversedge
Greg Lonnon
Eric Murray
Sean Rhea
Robb Romans
Berend De Schouwer
Julian Simioni
Thomas Weichmann

LTM Updated

jknotzke — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:23:48 +0000

Mark Liversedge has updated LTM and posted a beta patch to the mailing list.

The biggest improvement from my perspective is the ability to see your various power ranges for a time period. For instance, this is a plot of all my 5 minute power from 2008. You can see there being an improvement from March until September when it drops off again. Of course I may not have been doing 5 minute efforts during that time where the watts are low, but this still tells you very well what you were doing for that time.

5 Minute Power Plot

As well for people who just like to see lines all over the place, you can select multiple metrics and have something looking like your 2yr old’s painting.

Kandinsky