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(Author here)

There's no built-in mode for constant power. (Nor could there be, on the original Bike that I have, as the resistance control is manual.)

The new one might have it.

At a hardware level I'm not sure how well it would work. Out of the box, the tablet only queries the bike for cadence/power/resistance every 100ms, one query at a time in round robin, so your power reading is only coming every 300ms. However, the bike responds to queries much faster - on the order of 200-300us (https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/26/pelomon-part-ii-emulatin...), so an external device could certainly ask for updates faster. I'm not sure how rapidly the micro on the bike itself actually updates its own measurements and what ultimate time resolution is possible.




"Erg mode" is pretty core to expectations for smart trainers now. It can also lead to a sort of "workout failure death spiral" -- you start to fail at your interval, and your pedal stroke slows down, so the resistance increases to meet your power target, and you slow down some more...

This can end up chasing you up the cassette if you don't get back on top of it, or you don't adjust the workout bias (ie, reduce the overall power targets to something you can hit).

but you really want this, at least for structured training. It may NOT be important if your goal is "spin at home."

(Someone downtopic seems to think drawing a distinction between "people who mostly ride outside fast in pacelines" and "people who mostly just like spin classes" is somehow snobbery, but I don't see it that way at all.)




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