Support for Bike Indoor FTMS Smart trainer over BLE?

From what I can tell, the only supported Smart indoor bike trainer protocol is ANT+ FE-C.

After recently having bought a "state of the art" indoor trainer with "state of the art" BLE FTMS support, this is rather disappointing.

A premium garmin watch and premium indoor Smart trainer should be compatible, right?

As far as I can tell, I have the following options:

1. Wait/beg for Garmin to implement support. The fenix already has support for other BLE sensors, just not the FTMS protocol, so it is really just a matter of SW.

2. Implement it myself in a custom fenix app. However doubtful if this would solve the problem. Does the developer API go that deep? I would basically need to add support for a new type of sensor.

3. Implement this myself in an external unit such as a phone. It would have to be bidirectional as both sensor data and bike control messages are needed to be supported.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks

/Ola

Top Replies

5135968 over 3 years ago +1

2940028 said:
Any thoughts on this?

Yes, if your trainer didn't have ANT-FEC you made a bad choice in trainer purchase. It's really hard to find one that doesn't, too be honest - Saris, Wahoo, TacX all…

All Replies

0 5135968 over 3 years ago

2940028 said:
Any thoughts on this?

Yes, if your trainer didn't have ANT-FEC you made a bad choice in trainer purchase. It's really hard to find one that doesn't, too be honest - Saris, Wahoo, TacX all do both protocols.

ANT is generally the preferred protocol due to it's ability to maintain 1 to many connections.

It's a bit like buying a diesel car than complaining you can't fill it up with petrol!

0 Klick over 3 years ago

Hi,

Yes the api could go that deep. I was working on a proof of concept for the eliptical bike of my wife. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the bluetooth layer, that prevent many devices to be enumerated properly via BLE if specific bytes are the end of the list, which is the case for this device. So if you are a developer, give it a try, the parsing is absolutely doable (speed, cadence, distance), and if ftms is implemented without too much custom stuff, you can also control incline, etc

good luck !

0 2940028 over 3 years ago in reply to Klick

Ah! Thanks for the constructive answer!

Any further pointers to example code that I could have a look at?

I guess I would have to make the new sensor discoverable (and probably paired) the same way others are (ANT+ obviously, but also some BLE sensors acc to Garmin docs) . Then, I guess it would have to present itself to the system as a cadence or power sensor for it to be used as such.

Is there some design model showing where to hook in the new BLE sensor so that it becomes available in the smart trainer context?

Thanks

0 AMokDuke over 3 years ago

Hmm,

I have the same issue as well. Got an indoor rower machine with FTMS.

So far I found an app here: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/0e10bae1-9753-4915-b856-040d0cbdd82a#0 that seems to allow connection through FTMS.

They posted their source code here: https://github.com/zpukr/ArduRower

I haven't got it run successfully though. not sure what I am missing.

Cheers~