howdy everyone!
i’ve been trying to diversify my fitness routine, and i live in a bicycle town with lots of great trails (so they tell me). i’m wanting to get into gravel biking because i have too much to live for to get smashed by a car or modify my collar bone with a tree (jk y’all are cool i’m just a wuss).
one thing i really enjoy is the data part of my workouts, but i’m increasingly wary of putting my data into walled gardens like Apple Fitness or even Strava to a certain extent. and i have the technical know-how to store and curate my own data if needed (4 years as a professional Android developer and 15 years of programming experience). i’ve been advised to get a cycling computer, but many of my friends aren’t so technical and just grab whatever “Garmin” they can afford. and the folks at the shops will have little knowledge of underlying OS versions or chipsets or whatever.
so i wanted to reach out to the nerdiest cycling community i could think of and ask about it. i know gadgets in niche spaces can be kind of a wasteland in terms of open source or open API access or whatever, but is there such a device that’s hacker friendly? i don’t need another shitty smartphone strapped to my bike, but i also don’t want to miss any fun data collection features like power delivery (once i fully build out my kit; i’m building this out piecemeal).
any advice would be appreciated 🙏
I grabbed the cheapest reasonable looking iGPSport bike computer/tracker from aliexpress years ago. Didn’t have Garmin money. It did the job. Had excellent battery life. Stored my tracks. Connected with heart rate and cadance monitor. The device registered as a storage device over USB and could just copy the gpx files off the thing. There’s also android app that syncs over Bluetooth and with chinese igpsport web site (and can link to strava). Any how it was a bit hacky, but a cool relatively cheap device. Sadly I havent used it in years. Not sure about current igpsport devices. Maybe they will still do simple USB file transfers (if you want to stay offline), maybe not. Something to check out maybe. Not a huge investment.
ooo i like this. if nothing else it could be fun to tinker with. thanks for the lead 🙏