BLE and ANT+ are fundamentally different, the latter being a broadcast protocol. You can have any number of devices connected/logging the broadcast of an ANT+ device, while BLE is usually limited to one or two devices. I am sure is not a fundamental limitation of BLE but is the reality for the currently available chipsets.
The fact that it is unencrypted is completely irrelevant.
My heart rate data over a short period of time is not useful to anyone but myself, and that is the only personal data any of my ANT+ devices broadcast.
Unless you consider cadence to be personal information but that is also broadcasted to the world visually and is no more secret than the colour of my running or cycling shorts.
The rest of my devices broadcast mechanical, device status and/or environmental data.
> I am sure is not a fundamental but is the reality for the currently available chipsets.
It is pretty fundamental. Ant has an inverted master/slave (or whatever we're calling it nowdays) relationship. In Ant, the sensor determines the timing, and can broadcast to many receivers. In Bluetooth, the central device (phone) determines the timing, and each sensor connects to one central with a one-to-one connection.
There are ways around this limitation of BLE:
1. A few bytes of data can be stuffed in BLE advertising, so the sensor can communicate without a connection in the Ant style. To my knowledge, none of the Ant+-replacing profiles support this.
2. The sensor can basically run multiple instances of bluetooth stack at the same time to connect to multiple central devices. This basically doubles the resource usage, and good luck determining if your sensor supports this without trying it.
#2 appears to be the path forward. A few sensors support it already, and the next generation of radio SOCs will make the resource requirements less onerous.
Maybe encryption isn't important for you, but it is for some people, especially professional athletes. Imagine a Tour De France rider or their follow car being able to read the heart rate of their competitor - this could easily inform their strategy.
Imagine a Tour de France team who spends millions of dollars being unwilling to find a company to build them a custom monitor that supports heart rate monitoring with an encrypted data stream if they can’t find one off the shelf.
30 seconds of searching shows me the polar h10 is already multiprotocol and supports Bluetooth.
Good handshakes are actually hard. There's no UI on these gadgets, and often not even a single button! Consider going to a public gym and wanting your heartrate to show on the exercise bike -- you'll be pairing it right there, in public.
Radio transmit is expensive power-wise. The numbers I'm seeing for BLE energy per bit are all over the place, but the numbers I found for some SHA3 testing say that even with a pretty old chip fab you can make a circuit that encrypts more than 10 bytes per nanojoule. That's a pretty small tax.
Wireless shifters only transmit when you press a button. Power consumption is higher with other sensors that transmit continuously at 1Hz: heart rate, running foot pods, wheel speed, cadence, etc.
It's health and presence info. In surveillance capitalism your or your flat neighbour's devices might capture it, upload to cloud and sell it, the buyer of the info might combine it with location data etc to bind it to your identity, and sell it onwards.
The next time you buy health insurance or are involved in a court case the data may be used against your interests. (probably someone can invent a still more nefarious scenario)
And there is still no BLE replacement for Garmin "Tempe" sensor: no ultra-small rugged temperature sensor on the market (or I cannot find one! If you could point me to one, I will be very grateful!)
On the other hand, all Android phones dropped ANT+ support after approximately Android 9. My old Xiaomi Mi A1 supported ANT+ till some major update, my next phone (Samsung A72) didn't support it from the beginning, my current Pixel 8 Pro doesn't support it too. You need true "head unit" and cannot use phone as one.
Hardware is here, but drivers are not installed and cannot be installed from Playstore.
the most recent profile they added was an update to the cycling shifter profile. before that, the most recent actual new device type they added was radars in 2016.
ant+ is not a protocol that has or needs to have frequent updates. opening it up could have been a lot more significant than stopping the development of new profiles.
Surprisingly well written and just detailed enough to not leaving wanting more or overwhelmed.
I never really got in to ANT+ land with cycling but the couple things I tried I appreciated how easily they paired up.
Bluetooth feels like the obvious next place but with so much momentum behind ANT+ I wonder how long this transition will take.
If I read this piece correctly, is that going forward the suppliers are going to develop their own protocols. They find Bluetooth development to onerous.
It feels like the fitness brands need to come together and shut out the BT SIG and all fitness profiles should come out of that new consortium - which would be a formalising of what Wahoo did with the Kickr protocol.
I’m crossing my fingers that this EU move nudges Garmin, SRAM, Shimano, etc. to collaborate on an open Bluetooth protocol. Sick of the whole private extensions protocol approach.
All my equipment (except Tempe) is dual-standard now and my phone see my heartrate, cadence, bike speed (I don't how powermeters, though) in generic OSMAnd navigator application.
Looks like there ARE BLE profiles for these already.
Garmin has a market cap of ~40B USD. Inflation adjusted, that's where NVIDIA was <10yr ago. It's not missing resources to do the work IMO, but it's missing the market dominance to singlehanded set the standard for the industry.
Garmin is probably the biggest company in this space, and their answer was ant. I’m not sure if you’ve tried to do any integration work with Garmin, but it’s an atrocious experience. What little they do open up is locked behind business agreements and then they hand over some 5 year out of date pdf and call it “api documentation”. So yea if it’s up to Garmin again we are screwed.
Slightly off-topic but can anyone recommend a cheap viewer for the Garmin Varia Radars? It’s ANT+ but I can bring myself to pay hundreds for a bike computer when all I need is an LED and a beeping noise to indicate a car behind me. Cheapest I can find is a Bryton Rider 420.
I bought a mount for my phone but then discovered that vibrations can kill the autofocus/stabilisation, even with a damper.
It's about $100 direct from them or on AliExpress.
Ant+ and BLE, dual band GPS, comes with a Garmin compatible mount for your handlebar as part of the package too. Does turn by turn (but on the 630 doesn't reroute if you go off course, the 630S does though).
I've got it paired up with a Wahoo HRM, a Magene P505 power meter and the Magene Radar and it works flawlessly.
Edit: almost forgot, also integrates well with my Kickr Core. Exports in standard file formats so you can analyse your rides, bring them into other apps etc. as well as auto upload to Strava and Apple Health.
I've been considering getting the Magene power meter cranks as well but was a bit hesitant on account of the relatively larger price tag, and it being the first item I would be buying that is subject to tariffs in the EU (it's hard to figure out whether there are anti-dumping tariffs in place).
How are you enjoying them? Also, do you have any other nice Chinese cycling gear to recommend?
Yay! Fellow iGS630 user, there are literally DOZENS of us!
I'm really liking them, I started being more serious about training rather than just winging it (in my 40's, want to stay fit for as long as possible).
Their accuracy seems good, I've got the bike on the Kickr now and the numbers from that and the pedals agree with each other. Fitting them is super quick if you have some knowledge of bike maintenance and the required tools (a torque wrench is a must). I didn't get the chainrings, just the power meter and cranks as if felt silly not to just reuse my 105 R7100 rings. I use the DC Rainmaker analyser to view the data, which is easy with the iGS630 as I export the file via airdrop and then upload it.
As for other Chinese cycling brands, Magene and iGSPort are the only two I've used products from, and both have been solid, especially for the price - but there are some great YouTubers who cover the market, such as China Cycling (who also runs the Panda Podium store) and Luke from Trace Velo who's done deep dives on the electronic groupsets from LTwoo and the like.
Chinese bike parts manufacturers are really knocking it out of the park at the moment quality wise - it wasn't long ago that "Cheap Chinese Carbon Fibre" was a pejorative term.
So a phone app does everything, but you're just worried about your expensive phone? Get another. Search "android prepaid phone" they're mostly around $30.
Not to mention, phones overheat in direct sun and stop working. Phones' capacitive touchscreens are also completely unusable in rain, contrast to the physical controls on a cycle computer.
Cycle computers are much lighter than phones generally. Their mounts are more robust and aerodynamic. If you crash, you're very likely to destroy your phone, whereas cycle computers are generally fine unless you directly bash them into a rock. Cycle computers have configurable high brightness LEDs for navigation cues and other training specific data display like HR or power.
Ok rant over. Mumble mumble Chesterson's gadget. If one doesn't know why it exists, maybe ask why...
To save me some buck I strapped an old sport watch to the bike, it can connect to everything, last days on a single charge and it has physical buttons. Just as good.
Varia alerts don't utilize the screen, they are just buzzes and beeps. A phone will last for days with screen off, especially with no sim card. They asked for the cheapest option.
It's tempting to think that phones can do everything, and they sort of can, but not well. There's a time and place for dedicated hardware, and cycle computers are very firmly in that category, aside from very casual usage.
I think they meant that the vibrations mean the app doesn’t work because with the vibrations of the camera the picture is useless, not that it damages the phone.
Yes, and that is why I was asking for the treadmill. The article was confusing from the point of view of the user: go to the treadmill and see your heartbeat appearing. What will replace ANT+ in the future? How sport machines like treadmills will react to this reality? You need two to tango: health devices are only one side.
It looks like they're saying treadmills etc will "balkanize" to build their own protocols. that seems more difficult than something based off bluetooth. i agree that the article gets more vague the longer it got. i guess time will tell.
Bluetooth Low Energy will largely replace ANT+. There has been a heart rate profile available for years which most heart rate monitors support. Unfortunately, most treadmills are kind of crap for connectivity.
Isn't that just a BLE broadcast? Wouldn't it have the same fate with this regulation? You only get encryption from pairing, and I don't remember my BLE cadence sensor needing pairing.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
BLE and ANT+ are fundamentally different, the latter being a broadcast protocol. You can have any number of devices connected/logging the broadcast of an ANT+ device, while BLE is usually limited to one or two devices. I am sure is not a fundamental limitation of BLE but is the reality for the currently available chipsets.
The fact that it is unencrypted is completely irrelevant.
My heart rate data over a short period of time is not useful to anyone but myself, and that is the only personal data any of my ANT+ devices broadcast.
Unless you consider cadence to be personal information but that is also broadcasted to the world visually and is no more secret than the colour of my running or cycling shorts.
The rest of my devices broadcast mechanical, device status and/or environmental data.
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