Skip to main content

Get a Concept2 Rower on Zwift with a $10 Raspberry Pi!

Short story, I made a program.
Instructions and download here: https://github.com/mrverrall/go-row



Despite there being an appetite for rowing in Zwift the fact is a rowing machine is not a bicycle and a Concept2 rower won't connect directly to Zwift. The Zwift gods tease a rowing release every now and again, but it's been coming soon for years now. Don't hold your breath.

But people do row in Zwift, so how do they do it? To get the data from the rowers computer, the PM5, into something Zwift recognises as a bicycle you need a device that translates between the rower and the device running Zwift.

There are solutions already available to do this. Some are expensive like the NPE CABLE (about £90 in the UK, and some are free (of sorts) like the RowedBiker app. The downside with RowedBiker is you do need need an extra device to run the app and if you don't already have an extra (compatible) phone or tablet you're going to need to buy one. A Raspberry Pi Zero W meanwhile costs $10 and with it being springtime in 2020 I had some time at home to play with.

So after some not inconsiderable time spent working everything out it only bloody works! You can download it over on github, it even comes in a nice little install package.

And now, I’m off for a row... on Zwift.
Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Raspberry Pi A2DP Bluetooth Audio Receiver

I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to act as a Bluetooth audio receiver or my Hi-Fi so that I could connect a phone/tablet easily to some proper speakers wirelessly. Rather than reinventing the wheel 'kmonkey' has already achieved most of what I set out to do over here ; check this out first. The only issue now is the manual intervention needed to connect up a new Bluetooth source to the output sink. I initially created a simple bash script to poll pulseaudio (every 5 seconds) and run the necessary commands as and when a new device is connected. You can see the script here and all the pertinent commands are explained over in kmonkey's blog. This is all good, but will need to be run manually using something like, # nohup ./bt_audio_attach & This is a bit rubbish and you'll be pleased to know there is a better way to get this done, UDEV! Over at the Raspbery Pi forums   there's some discussion on using UDEV scripts to automate this process entirely. Initia
19 comments
Read more

Blocking Adverts from the Roku Menu

UPDATE: 18 May 2013 - A new firmware (v5) has changed the way ads are handled on the Roku such that this guide is no longer relevant.  Roku are are a pretty neat little media streaming box but one thing that I think lets them down are the trashy and mostly irrelevant adverts on the home page. Wouldn't it be great if you could get rid of these? The ads are served by the third party ad platform,  ZEDO . You can block the ads from displaying by simply blocking this domain entirely or by being more targeted and blocking the specific sub-domain serving the Roku ads. A TCPDUMP of my Roku shows that the ad images currently come from 'd7.zedo.com' (although this may change). I block them by adding a custom DNS record for this sub-domain to my home router pointing to the loopback address (127.0.0.1). There are or course many other ways you could do this, but the best way will largely depend on your own set-up and resources.
19 comments
Read more

Moodle on Centos or Red Hat 7 (with SELinux!)

Why the need for another 'Installing Moodle' guide? Two reasons, Systemd and SELinux. The steps are presented as a Bash script, which may be run on a virgin system, installing a complete working Moodle stack in one go, including enforcing SELinux. In addition to the absolute basics it also includes adding ClamAV virus for file uploads and Memcached for sessions and 'MUC'. It does not cover any extras you will need to get your site up to production, e.g. securing your database  or updating your virus definitions automatically. Neither does it do any extra PHP configuration (upload limits, execution time etc.) or any extra complexities that might be desirable. For all of this you should goto  docs.moodle.org .
4 comments
Read more