Originally Posted by caloso

I did my first winter on Zwift with a 20-year old Nashbar fluid trainer and my road bike with a Quarq PM. You don't need a speed sensor because all Zwift needs to simulate your speed in the game is power (plus your weight and height, which you enter in your profile). The Quarq (and I assume most PMs) also transmit cadence, which is nice to have if you do workouts with cadence targets, but the game works without it. Heart rate is also nice to have if you're tracking that, but again it's not necessary to make the bike move in Zwift space.

Now I have a Kinetic with the In Ride sensor, which does power and cadence on its own. That allows me to use any of my bikes. When it's calibrated, the In-Ride is very close to the Quarq. Impressively so. I think it's a great bang-for-the-buck. You don't get the feedback of a smart trainer, but that may not matter to you. Personally, 90% of the time I'm on Zwift it's to do a structured workout, so all I care about is hitting the wattage and cadence targets.

As for my set-up, I use an iPad to run the game. I have it on a music stand next to my bike and that's connected to a flat screen TV with a Lightning to HDMI cable.