The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter and Facebook, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!
So with that, let’s get into the action!
DCRAINMAKER.com Posts in the Past Week:
Here’s all the goodness that ended up on the main page of DCRainmaker.com this past week:
Elite (at least in the US) has dropped the price of the Drivo I trainer down to $1,099 (from $1,299) – due to the incoming Drivo II’s that just came out. If you haven’t seen my review, the main differences are that the Drivo II is barely more accurate (+/- 0.5% versus the previous +/- 1.0%). Of course, accuracy was never really an issue on the Drivo I. Arguably well above what most people care about, and, it can do it three times faster (which people do care about). Note, the new Drivo II price will be $1,199 – so when all is said and done, the Drivo line shifts down $100, which makes it on-par with others in this category. Once the Drivo I units are gone, they’re gone.
At the same time they’re also dropping the existing Direto pricing for a bit of a sale from $899 to $799. Their hand was somewhat forced here with Tacx dropping the Flux 1 pricing down to $799 as well in June, and then atop that you’ve got the silent KICKR CORE going for $899. Elite says there’s a very slightly tweaked Direto coming in September which will increase accuracy a tiny bit as well (+/- 2.5% down to +/- 2.0%) and also include a riser block. This variant will be at $849 and will be the price the Direto will be offered at from September 30th.
In related news, Wahoo just pushed back initial availability slightly on the KICKR CORE until September 12th, 2018. They say this is to better stockpile inventory, though, I’ve never really understood that logic for an announced product. Ship what you’ve got, get it in people’s hands.
Stuff that I found interesting around the interwebs:
Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet.
1) Is Wahoo violating licensing GPL on their ELEMNT/BOLT units? Potentially, but, here’s an even more interesting tear-down of the software behind the Android-based unit – done by a DCR reader no less! Thanks to everyone else that sent this in. [Update: Wahoo’s CEO says they’re going to fix the attribution issues.]
2) Pulse Oximetry data is apparently in TrainingPeaks: Go figure, things I didn’t know. Of course, the only reason I bring this up is with the new Fenix 5X Plus now supporting Pulse Oximetry data, this seems like a good place for that data to go. To my knowledge though, there’s no such recording of the data that 3rd parties can access/leverage quite yet (I believe it is recorded, but not in an API-kinda way).
4) Spotify Playlists to match your Zwift Structured workouts: Cool stuff, they’ve taken a bunch of specific Zwift workouts and aligned songs to them from Spotify. You can easily add these lists to your existing Spotify account. Note that Zwiftalizer does a lot of cool Zwift computing/geekery analysis.
6) Merging of my drone and Kinomap footage: Put this on the list of things I meant to link to a long-ass time ago. Some of you may remember back this winter when I was in Australia (and it was summer), I tried out an autonomous drone that has 13 cameras while running (this one). Anyway, Kinomap put together a completely live overlay of the drone footage tied to mapping. In theory you could re-run or re-ride this. Obviously it’s a bit of a test/demo of what their tech can do (I didn’t provide them with any GPS files).
7) Zwift World Changer App: You may already know about the Zwift world changer file modification thing you can do on PC/Mac/iOS, but you may not know there’s actually a little utility that makes it silly easy too on PC/Mac.
Sports Technology Software/Firmware Updates This Week:
Each week I quickly highlight some of the new firmware, app, software and website service updates that I see go out. If you’re a sports technology company and release an update – shoot me a quick note (just one-liners are perfect, or Tweet it at me is even better) and I’ll make mention of it here. If I don’t know about it, I won’t be able to post about it. Sound good? Oh – and if you want to get a head start on things, this page is a great resource for watching Garmin and a few other firmware updates.
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It might be worth a poke at Wahoo about the fact that all of the firmware releases for the Bolt and Element since January 11 2018 have been bug fixes only (except for adding support for the KICKR Climb and SRAM Tyrewiz).
This runs counter to their earlier practice of adding new capabilities on a regular basis. Lots of requests have been made around new features and improving the current functionality but nothing has happened.
Are Wahoo too distracted by peripherals like the Headwind and Climb to give due attention to their Computers?
I’ve got no doubt that the focus on bringing four new products to maker in the last month probably contributes to that. Remember, it’s not just Headwind and CLIMB, but also the new KICKR 2018 and KICKR CORE as well. Plus whatever else they’ve got working on for future releases.
Fair enough but I would have thought the teams for the KICKR and Elemnt wouldn’t have huge overlap and thus shouldn’t block each other. 7 months without any real improvement is donkey’s years in bike tech ;-)
And thus you may have found the real reason they took on private equity funding to accelerate product growth. ;)
I do think your point raises an interesting topic: The assumption that new features will be added. In some cases, users feel like it’s a requirement that new features unannounced at launch will be added down the road to existing products.
Obviously, companies take very different approaches to this. Companies like GoPro for example almost never roll-out any meaningfully notable new features for existing products. Whereas others like Garmin and Apple tend to.
Where it gets more interesting is usually ‘new’ product categories – such as Wahoo’s bike computers in the first few years, where they were mostly catch-up to Garmin. These days, that’s less of an issue.
Hey rainmaker as per 2) on your list- Is it correct that the placement of the Fenix 5X+ on the arm would mean thatit’s oxymetry measurements would only be relevant to acclimatization measurements and not general sports performance measurements, i.e. blood oxygen levels in ones legs as a measurement of performance/capacity or can things be extrapolated by measuring at the wrist somehow?
While not understanding fully some of what I read about the whole licensing / GPL stuff I will fully admit I will be unbelievably agitated if because of this hacking / looking around some future update to my element brings ugly slowness and multiple screens of lets give a shout out to this development and that development. I do not care that the hacker thinks its “rude” to do what he is saying they are doing. It is none of his business really. No one is paying him or electing him to check and evaluate what the coding does or does not do. It works perfectly so far for me, I am getting what I paid for and that is good enough. Should those companies that wrote the code be worried about their “shout outs” then let them police it themselves. For all we know they are aware and have been necessarily compensated.
Sorry, but you are totally wrong here. The “hacker” was playing nicely when calling it rude. If his findings are correct then Wahoos practices are plainly illegal. Its also not a matter of compensations. The licensing of the software they used basically states: If you want to use this, you need to attribute that you are using it and, as it is licensed this way, no compensation can overcome this issue. Have a look at current Garmin devices they all have a section in their settings attributing to several projects. Even worse, in case of the GPL the license also states that if you want to use that peace of software, you also need to provide the source code of your software.
Additionally, the mentioned software was not developed by a company but mainly by private people who worked on the software in their spare time and who where so nice to provide the result – free of charge- to the public. Everyone can use it – as long as you stick to the license. So what wahoo has done, if the blog is correct, is to grab a this software which saved themselves a lot of time and money and to pack it into their unit without even attributing all the developers that worked on the software.
as someone who has GPL/Apache licensed code all over the linux and android distros I find it very rude they are using my code without attribution, thanks for Josh to point this out. Remember if those GPL licensed ‘free’ code didn’t exist, most of the internet as you see it today would not be the same. Here is a link for you to understand why GPL and attributions is important link to torquemag.io and more technical link to noordering.wordpress.com
Self replying to myself: In a comment on HackerNews, the CEO of Wahoo just promised to add the necessary attributions link to news.ycombinator.com
(In case you don’t know HackerNews – its a super influential social news platform focusing on computer science)
If its all LGPL and Apache2 then doesn’t wahoo just need attribution in the about screen? Both trival to do and of no impact to any users. Don’t see how making the needed modifications would hurt the Bolt in any way.
It’s an Android device, so obviously runs Linux which is GPLv2 licensed. There already *full source code* is required, not merely attribution. For any of the Apache2 stuff, attribution is just the basic starting point, you still need to release modifications. Some of the stuff like Mapsforge is LGPLv3 – attribution, full source code and the ability for the end user to add his own modifications and run them on the device. Good luck with the latter.
@Rein No I do not work for wahoo and sorry to say but don’t give a flying leap if you think it was a stupid comment. You have zero influence over my life. Glad to say all of the free world can sleep better tonight because Wahoo is going to say someone wrote a piece of code. Nice way to disparage the hard working employees of the company with that part of your reply.
How could it be recorded, but not in an API-kinda way? Garmin is recording the data to a separate file? They are recording it to the FIT file but aren’t following the FIT file spec? It may be a developer field and not in a standardized part of the FIT file but seems like that is still 3rd party accessible.
Plenty of places to record data that aren’t part of either of the two main API’s that Garmin has for 3rd parties to access data.
Obviously, there are plans in motion for Connect IQ apps to access this data (as alluded to at the CIQ summit in fact, pre-announcement). But that doesn’t solve it for post-workout apps, like Training Peaks.
That data has to be sent to that 3rd party via the Garmin API (just like it took a while for weight scale data to be sent via that API). It’s not so much whether or not Garmin follows a .FIT file spec, but whether or not they transmit that non-workout file to 3rd parties. At present, I’m not aware of them doing so.
Hey Ray, not sure if you know but Lezyne have released a firmware update for their y10 products. Still no update for there mega GPS range (probably still trying to sort out the Strava live segment deletion that you were talking about last week). Not sure how many of your viewers own a Lezyne GPS computer (I do), so maybe you didn’t put it up for a reason. Oh wells it’s here now.
There is no question, they are violating a long list of licenses. The most egregious of these is the LGPLv3 Mapsforge library – this will be almost impossible for them to come into compliance with, given the license explicitly requires that it must be possible for an end user to run his own version *on his device*.
Garmin needs to find someone with copyright on any one of the innumerable licensed stuff they willfully stole and get an injunction. It’s 2018 and about 20 years past the point where you could feign ignorance to any of this.
Not attributing the use of the open source libraries was an oversight. I take full responsibility, all the base code we used was provided by our chip supplier and they never mentioned the open source requirements that went along with its use. Now that I/we know we’re getting them in and will also provide source where it’s specified. The only libraries we modified were mapsforge and we are listed as an official contributor on their site.
What is actually done since then Chip? Did it blew over? I still ll see many apache 2.0 licensed software being used in latest firmware and I could be worng but I don’t see all that hard labor from others is being credited.
Rara, It was fixed up at the time, you can access it from the phone companion app. It’s under “Attributions” on the Settings Tab. I just took a look at it looks to be complete, was there something in particular you think we are missing?
Hi, DCR readers! I got in contact with Chip over at Wahoo Fitness, and they seem to be taking it pretty seriously — *and*, he’s sent me some cool goodies to mess with hacking the Bolt’s firmware. Once I can verify that I can get it working myself, I’ll pass it along… hopefully I’ll have some stuff I can share later tonight when I get home from work for the day.
Speaking of the Edge 130–did you ever get around to testing out the extended display feature (looks like it made it into the firmware an update or two ago)? Most curious how it links up with the 935.
So Wahoo stole software to produce their own products. That’s the lowest of the low.
I’ve never understood why some people seem to have preference for Wahoo over Garmin. The hardware isn’t is good, the software isn’t as good, the support and updating isn’t as good, and now it turns out they stole their software from other authors.
At least Hammerhead — whose Karoo still appears to be a complete cluster going by their blog — are up front and honest. (I think they’ve brought in a ‘director of communications’) this year.)
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Yup, that’s right, we’re packing up shop and moving over to the land of …. and of chocolate macaroons! Actually, rather, we’ve already packed up shop – over three weeks ago. The stuff is slowly plodding it’s way across the Atlantic (just off the coast of Newfoundland as of tonight).
Last week, we showed you our final apartment selection with the House Hunters style series. However, getting all of our stuff into our apartment was probably even more fun.
One of the things we both really enjoy doing is going to u-pick farms and picking our own fruits and vegetables. In the past, we’ve primarily picked apples, blueberries, and strawberries. Given it’s fall (crazy, huh?), we figured it was time to go out and pick some apples.
Let’s make this clear up front – Paris is nowhere near a beach. The closest oceanesque body of water with sand is roughly 200 kilometers away – and the water there isn’t terribly warm either (the nice stuff is down south). So what do the Parisians do in the hot summer months (aside from close up shop and leave)? They truck in a boatload of sand and setup a beach right in the heart of Paris on the Seine.
Are you coming to Paris? Looking for places to swim, bike and run? Or just simply want to see where I swim/bike/run? Well, here’s the skinny on all my favorite training locations – complete with maps and downloadable routes.
It might be worth a poke at Wahoo about the fact that all of the firmware releases for the Bolt and Element since January 11 2018 have been bug fixes only (except for adding support for the KICKR Climb and SRAM Tyrewiz).
This runs counter to their earlier practice of adding new capabilities on a regular basis. Lots of requests have been made around new features and improving the current functionality but nothing has happened.
Are Wahoo too distracted by peripherals like the Headwind and Climb to give due attention to their Computers?
I’ve got no doubt that the focus on bringing four new products to maker in the last month probably contributes to that. Remember, it’s not just Headwind and CLIMB, but also the new KICKR 2018 and KICKR CORE as well. Plus whatever else they’ve got working on for future releases.
Fair enough but I would have thought the teams for the KICKR and Elemnt wouldn’t have huge overlap and thus shouldn’t block each other. 7 months without any real improvement is donkey’s years in bike tech ;-)
And thus you may have found the real reason they took on private equity funding to accelerate product growth. ;)
I do think your point raises an interesting topic: The assumption that new features will be added. In some cases, users feel like it’s a requirement that new features unannounced at launch will be added down the road to existing products.
Obviously, companies take very different approaches to this. Companies like GoPro for example almost never roll-out any meaningfully notable new features for existing products. Whereas others like Garmin and Apple tend to.
Where it gets more interesting is usually ‘new’ product categories – such as Wahoo’s bike computers in the first few years, where they were mostly catch-up to Garmin. These days, that’s less of an issue.
Hey rainmaker as per 2) on your list- Is it correct that the placement of the Fenix 5X+ on the arm would mean thatit’s oxymetry measurements would only be relevant to acclimatization measurements and not general sports performance measurements, i.e. blood oxygen levels in ones legs as a measurement of performance/capacity or can things be extrapolated by measuring at the wrist somehow?
While not understanding fully some of what I read about the whole licensing / GPL stuff I will fully admit I will be unbelievably agitated if because of this hacking / looking around some future update to my element brings ugly slowness and multiple screens of lets give a shout out to this development and that development. I do not care that the hacker thinks its “rude” to do what he is saying they are doing. It is none of his business really. No one is paying him or electing him to check and evaluate what the coding does or does not do. It works perfectly so far for me, I am getting what I paid for and that is good enough. Should those companies that wrote the code be worried about their “shout outs” then let them police it themselves. For all we know they are aware and have been necessarily compensated.
Sorry, but you are totally wrong here. The “hacker” was playing nicely when calling it rude. If his findings are correct then Wahoos practices are plainly illegal. Its also not a matter of compensations. The licensing of the software they used basically states: If you want to use this, you need to attribute that you are using it and, as it is licensed this way, no compensation can overcome this issue. Have a look at current Garmin devices they all have a section in their settings attributing to several projects. Even worse, in case of the GPL the license also states that if you want to use that peace of software, you also need to provide the source code of your software.
Additionally, the mentioned software was not developed by a company but mainly by private people who worked on the software in their spare time and who where so nice to provide the result – free of charge- to the public. Everyone can use it – as long as you stick to the license. So what wahoo has done, if the blog is correct, is to grab a this software which saved themselves a lot of time and money and to pack it into their unit without even attributing all the developers that worked on the software.
Do you work for Wahoo? I can only imagine such a stupid comment from one of their employees.
Anyways back to topic. We’ve seen companies get in trouble after GPL issues, especially the bigger ones. I wonder how they’re going to deal with this.
Wahoo can bury themself in a hole here.
as someone who has GPL/Apache licensed code all over the linux and android distros I find it very rude they are using my code without attribution, thanks for Josh to point this out. Remember if those GPL licensed ‘free’ code didn’t exist, most of the internet as you see it today would not be the same. Here is a link for you to understand why GPL and attributions is important link to torquemag.io and more technical link to noordering.wordpress.com
Self replying to myself: In a comment on HackerNews, the CEO of Wahoo just promised to add the necessary attributions link to news.ycombinator.com
(In case you don’t know HackerNews – its a super influential social news platform focusing on computer science)
Lets see how fast he will make this happen.
If its all LGPL and Apache2 then doesn’t wahoo just need attribution in the about screen? Both trival to do and of no impact to any users. Don’t see how making the needed modifications would hurt the Bolt in any way.
It’s an Android device, so obviously runs Linux which is GPLv2 licensed. There already *full source code* is required, not merely attribution. For any of the Apache2 stuff, attribution is just the basic starting point, you still need to release modifications. Some of the stuff like Mapsforge is LGPLv3 – attribution, full source code and the ability for the end user to add his own modifications and run them on the device. Good luck with the latter.
@Rein No I do not work for wahoo and sorry to say but don’t give a flying leap if you think it was a stupid comment. You have zero influence over my life. Glad to say all of the free world can sleep better tonight because Wahoo is going to say someone wrote a piece of code. Nice way to disparage the hard working employees of the company with that part of your reply.
@sam thank you for the links. I WILL read the information later so I might learn why my opinion seems misguided.
This is beneath the level of discourse usually practiced in this forum. I think DCR should moderate it.
How could it be recorded, but not in an API-kinda way? Garmin is recording the data to a separate file? They are recording it to the FIT file but aren’t following the FIT file spec? It may be a developer field and not in a standardized part of the FIT file but seems like that is still 3rd party accessible.
log dump ?
Plenty of places to record data that aren’t part of either of the two main API’s that Garmin has for 3rd parties to access data.
Obviously, there are plans in motion for Connect IQ apps to access this data (as alluded to at the CIQ summit in fact, pre-announcement). But that doesn’t solve it for post-workout apps, like Training Peaks.
That data has to be sent to that 3rd party via the Garmin API (just like it took a while for weight scale data to be sent via that API). It’s not so much whether or not Garmin follows a .FIT file spec, but whether or not they transmit that non-workout file to 3rd parties. At present, I’m not aware of them doing so.
Hey Ray, not sure if you know but Lezyne have released a firmware update for their y10 products. Still no update for there mega GPS range (probably still trying to sort out the Strava live segment deletion that you were talking about last week). Not sure how many of your viewers own a Lezyne GPS computer (I do), so maybe you didn’t put it up for a reason. Oh wells it’s here now.
Only the new Mega-XL and Mega-C will have Strava Live Segments removed.
They’re sending over a unit next week sometime for review (well, two units).
There is no question, they are violating a long list of licenses. The most egregious of these is the LGPLv3 Mapsforge library – this will be almost impossible for them to come into compliance with, given the license explicitly requires that it must be possible for an end user to run his own version *on his device*.
Garmin needs to find someone with copyright on any one of the innumerable licensed stuff they willfully stole and get an injunction. It’s 2018 and about 20 years past the point where you could feign ignorance to any of this.
Hi Stefan,
Not attributing the use of the open source libraries was an oversight. I take full responsibility, all the base code we used was provided by our chip supplier and they never mentioned the open source requirements that went along with its use. Now that I/we know we’re getting them in and will also provide source where it’s specified. The only libraries we modified were mapsforge and we are listed as an official contributor on their site.
-Chip from Wahoo
What is actually done since then Chip? Did it blew over? I still ll see many apache 2.0 licensed software being used in latest firmware and I could be worng but I don’t see all that hard labor from others is being credited.
Rara, It was fixed up at the time, you can access it from the phone companion app. It’s under “Attributions” on the Settings Tab. I just took a look at it looks to be complete, was there something in particular you think we are missing?
Thanks for letting us know where to find this info.Seems to be a complete list indeed.
Hi, DCR readers! I got in contact with Chip over at Wahoo Fitness, and they seem to be taking it pretty seriously — *and*, he’s sent me some cool goodies to mess with hacking the Bolt’s firmware. Once I can verify that I can get it working myself, I’ll pass it along… hopefully I’ll have some stuff I can share later tonight when I get home from work for the day.
I guess Chip has now realized that Wahoo is in a bit of trouble here. This might get interesting. Thank you, Joshua, for digging into this.
Speaking of the Edge 130–did you ever get around to testing out the extended display feature (looks like it made it into the firmware an update or two ago)? Most curious how it links up with the 935.
Not yet no. On my short-term to-do list now that I’m past Eurobike. That was sorta holding up the works.
That’s put me off Wahoo completely. Seems like a dishonest company. How can they not know what software they are using???
So Wahoo stole software to produce their own products. That’s the lowest of the low.
I’ve never understood why some people seem to have preference for Wahoo over Garmin. The hardware isn’t is good, the software isn’t as good, the support and updating isn’t as good, and now it turns out they stole their software from other authors.
At least Hammerhead — whose Karoo still appears to be a complete cluster going by their blog — are up front and honest. (I think they’ve brought in a ‘director of communications’) this year.)
If the elemnt run Android how come they managed to do phone notification etc. using Bluetooth when Hammerhead and sigma can’t get it to work?