Tag: computer

Hammerhead Wahoo

As you may be aware, I’ve gained a Wahoo Bolt version 2. I’ve also gained a Hammerhead Karoo 2. I’ve been weighing up the pros and cons of each, in order to decide who gets the priority on my bars. We shall start with the wahoo. I’ve time for wahoo, I’ve previously used the original ELEMNT, and found it very good.

So, the bolt has had a couple of issues, but they appear to of been sorted with firmware updates. So, feature wise, the bolt is feature sparse. It does routes, strava segments and everything else you’d expect a gps unit to do. It doesn’t have the climber feature that the Karoo has. But what it does, it does really well. I find it easy to glance down, and see what I need quickly and easily. Even in bright sunlight it’s clear and easy to see. The size however can be an issue. At times, it can just be a little small, especially with turn by turn directions where the instruction is quite long. Wahoo have addressed this by increasing the font size, but sometimes it can still be too small.

The map is detailed enough to see upcoming roads and details, it does however lack certain details. The changes wahoo have made to the maps have been beneficial to the bolt, with inbuilt elevation and street details making on device routing quick and easy.

The varia radar works with clear distinct tones, one thing that irks me, is while the radar is connected, the green bar is permanently on screen, mind you this is the same on all garmin units too. Overall, I like the unit.

The Karoo is a beast. Both in size and power. Based on android, it’s closer to a mobile phone than GPS. It is an excellent unit for exploring, with incredible mapping, that includes many POI and details. Where this unit falls down for me, is readability in sunlight. It’s not great.

However, the varia radar bar does disappear when it’s not required. Sensor wise, both units pair to all sensors you’d expect. Power meters, varia, speed, heart rate etc. One bonus for the Karoo, is that like Garmin units, it can control smart lights. Not with the finesse of Garmin units, but it’ll turn them on at the start of a ride, and off at the end. Both units have issues with my stages gen2 crank. Neither will calibrate, and the hammerhead only connects over BlueTooth. Ant+ causes the power meter to drop out often. To be fair, I’ve not tried calibration on the bolt after the last couple of updates, and hammerhead are saying they are working on power meter code. Both units on that note get regular updates, with Karoo every couple of weeks, and the bolt less frequently.

Update: as of firmware WA20-12513. The bolt now correctly calibrates the Power meter. Karoo have also released an update 1.220.1066 which states they have fixed the issue, but I’ve yet to test. Now I’ve given the hammerhead a quick test to see, and it does calibrate. I shall ride with it tomorrow and see about dropouts.

Using the unit, I find myself looking at it far longer than the bolt, partly due to glare, partly due to having to hunt for what I need. Swiping the data rich pages is a pleasure, each page coming on per swipe. But I don’t get that instant data I get with the bolt. And that’s an issue to me. However, if I was exploring a new area, the Karoo is my choice due to routing, maps and accuracy. If I’m just out on a ride, following a route or not, the bolt is on my bars.

Raspberry Pi

I’ve gained another raspberry pi for the home network. I’ve been thinking what I can do with it.

I tried running a squid proxy, and to be honest, it’s just not worth the effort. Most websites now use HTTPS, and a result of which will not be cached or scanned by the proxy. And the overall speedup of the network was non existent or very close to minimal benefit.

So, I settled on running a OpenVPN server, so I can access the whole network when away from the house. This makes things more secure as I no longer have to have the CCTV system open to the internet, and I can use it to route around other networks I don’t trust. Which is pretty much all networks not under my control. I’ve also used the box in the backup scheme. It now takes the archive from its primary location, and copies it to a NAS, and once a month runs a scrip to compress it to a tar.gz and copy it to another NAS on the system. This gives me 3 copies of the data, plus my copies on Amazon S3. So all that data should be pretty safe.

The NAS boxes are connected only when data is being copied, and disconnected when done to avoid any nasties corrupting the backups between updates. I’ll update the scripts I use and publish or update my previous post on the back up later.

Now, I just need to get each of them mounted via NFS to my main desktop so I can work on the scripts without having to SSH to them.

Statistics. Damn Statistics

I love pouring over data. I collect it how I can, when I can and as often as I can.

One of the tools I use to generate some stats when I’m cycling is my Garmin 510. I thought I’d just take the time to show how I have mine setup, as there are plenty of reviews on the unit already.

So, there are a few activity profiles you can choose from. The way I have mine setup is with three profiles, Train, Commute and Race. I use Train the most, followed by commute. Train is setup to show the most information on each of the available five screens.

The first screen I have as this. Showing:108

  1. Time Moving
  2. Current Speed
  3. Distance Covered
  4. Current Cadence
  5. Heart Rate
  6. Elevation
  7. Temperature

The last two on this, elevation and temperature are not important metrics, and can be removed. But everything else, is what I’d call an “At a glance Metric”, ie, something you want to see when you glance down. This is where I have the unit display data when I ride normally, as it is the most important set of metrics.

The second screen

  1. 40Elapsed time – The total time the unit has been recording, including auto-paused time.
  2. Average Speed
  3. Average Heart Rate
  4. Average Cadence
  5. Total Ascent
  6. Total Descent

This is the screen I take in when I stop, as it shows the information as a set of averages.

The Third Screen142

Shows a little miscellaneous information I find handy to have

  1. Time of Day
  2. Sunset. Handy so you know when the light will start to fail
  3. Maximum Speed
  4. Calories burnt
  5. Battery level
  6. GPS Accuracy

The Fourth Screen

  1. Current Heart rate148
  2. Heart Rate Graph over time
  3. HR Zone currently
  4. % of max heart rate

This is probably the second most active screen I use, especially when I’m pushing. I can keep myself in a HR zone, and closely monitor when I need to push, or calm down. I find the heart rate graph to be incredibly useful to see the pattern over time.

The Fifth Screen

154I show laps on the final screen, not really something I use a lot of, but its good to have it here.

  1. Number of laps currently recorded
  2. Speed of the last lap
  3. Heart Rate on the last Lap
  4. Last Lap Time
  5. Current Lap Time

I have the profile set to Auto-Lap at 2 miles. I dont often take much notice of laps when I’m riding, but it comes in handy on RideWithGPS when I review.

When I’m done with the ride, I’ll head on over to RideWithGPS.com and look there. By far RideWithGPS has the best data handling of the main cycling sites I use. (Strava, Endomondo, Garmin Connect and RideWithGPS).

Head on over, select one of my rides on the site, and see the power you can have, to break rides down into sections, overall stats, and stats on selected parts, it really is very powerful.