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Row a Concept2 on Zwift with a $10 Raspberry Pi!

Despite there being a clear appetite for rowing in Zwift, the reality is that a rowing machine is not a bicycle. A Concept2 rower will not connect to Zwift out of the box. The Zwift team occasionally hint at a future rowing mode, but it has been “coming soon” for years. I would not hold your breath.


That said, people do row in Zwift. So how are they doing it?

The key challenge is that Zwift expects to see a bicycle. To make this work, you need a way to translate data from the rower’s performance monitor, the PM5, into something Zwift recognises as a bike. This means inserting a device between the rower and the device running Zwift that can perform that translation.

There are already solutions available. Some are relatively expensive, such as the NPE CABLE, which costs around £90 in the UK. Others are technically free, like the RowedBiker app. The downside with RowedBiker is that it needs to run on an additional device separate from the one running Zwift. If you already have a compatible phone or tablet, that might be fine. If not, you will need to buy something.

A Raspberry Pi Zero W, on the other hand, costs about $10. I already had one to hand and, back in spring 2020, I suddenly found myself with a bit more time to experiment.

After a fair amount of trial and error, it eventually worked. Properly. You can download the result from GitHub, and it even comes with a tidy installer to make setup straightforward.

And now, I am off for a row. On Zwift.

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Comments

  1. Dave14 January 2022 at 20:57

    Awesome - super easy to download and install and I'll be darn - it just works !!!

    Thank you so much

    ReplyDelete

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