instant-on iOS app?
 

I roll out of the garage w/ my planetbike computer and it records mileage w/o me ever touching it.

Any iPhone app do this, maybe by noticing data from Wahoo bluetooth sensors?

Most phone apps that I have used will display speed when a bike is moving but won't start recording distance until the ride is started. I use Cyclemeter on my iPhone and it will record speed, cadence and heart rate but distance remains zero until I start the ride.

I don't believe any apps do, but it's a good idea. It would result in increased battery consumption albeit (could) be low.

J.

It depends. Bluetooth sensors are paired to specific apps, like Cyclometer, so I'd expect iOS to have a way wake up the app associated with an active sensor, kind of like how unix deals with ports. But maybe not.

Agree. That will have incremental battery consumption. Whether it is significant or not, I don't know.

Either way, I really doubt that anyone is going to bother with this for an iPhone app.

J.

Ride Report automatically tracks cycling activity and integrates with HealthKit. The app description says it uses the phone's GPS (sparingly) but it seems to undercount mileage compared to either conventional cyclometers or dedicated GPS.

It says it works best with iPhone 5 or newer. It also says it's compatible with iPad and iPod Touch, but since the Touch doesn't have GPS, I can't imagine the app doing anything useful on it, and likewise for WiFi-only iPads, which lack GPS.

How is it going to differentiate between cycling, walking, running or driving in a car?

J.

Wahoo Fitness offers a speed threshold setting to help differentiate between bicycling and walking or other slow motion. So, for example, it can be set to record speeds faster than, say, 5 mph, toward an overall average. That would ignore most walking and slow motion cycling (for example if you're stuck in traffic or behind lots of walkers on the MUP).

I'm not sure whether Cyclemeter offers this feature -- it has so many options it may be buried in a sub-sub-sub-menu.

This could also indirectly provide some privacy buffer. Set the threshold to around 10 mph and it won't begin recording until you're outside and a short distance from your home or apartment (unless you launch from your doorway like it's a downhill race). Strava already has a privacy buffer feature, designed to mask our precise starting/stopping location within a blurred radius of a couple hundred yards or so. I've asked the folks at Cyclemeter to add this option, and they said they'd consider it.

Technically Wahoo Fitness could be left on full time with the motion threshold set high enough to record only bike rides. And perhaps the "stop to record laps" feature could differentiate between rides. But it would drain the battery every day.

A dedicated bike computer would be simpler. Some of 'em cost less than $20. Now that I've used iPhone apps for cycling for more than a year I'm leaning toward getting simple, cheap computers for both bikes.

None of these auto initiate so it would be just one big ride. If you don't start it recording it won't record.

I also believe that with most mobile apps they are reloved from memory with a least frequently used algorithm so they cannot be "on"
All the time in the background active enough to be monitoring position with sufficient resolution to record a ride.

The suggestion to have a sensor initiate a ride is useful but there would have to be some other logic to go with that and peripherals would need to be able to initiate an app.

So I do not believe the capability exists in the pure sense as initially requested. But I could be wrong.

J.

As long as the phone app is running in the background, an auto initiate feature is a simple thing to program into the app. It has to monitor the GPS and/or Bluetooth radio signals passing through the assigned communication ports and then start the ride. However, there are reasons why this isn't done. For starters, if you forget to stop the previous ride, your next ride becomes a continuation of the that ride. If your cycling app stores your rides on the phone, as Cyclemeter does, there is the issue of the on-board database connection. The DB connection stays open until the End or Stop button is pressed. If you don't stop the ride, the connection remains open and if you accidentally force stop the app or power off the phone, it can easily corrupt the entire database under certain conditions.

However, phone apps do display speed, HR and cadence even if the ride is not started. Distance, ride time and other metrics that require a starting point will not be tracked.

How can it distinguish between cycling and walking? If it doesn't have a STOP function, won't it consider you to be on one very long ride?

I use Ride Report on an iPhone 6s. Mostly so I can the Health app show my mileage. Just gives distance and average speed, if memory serves. The results are not too far off a Polar v650, good enough for me anyway. It does not appear to drain the battery any more than the rest of the apps, and is quite good at automatically starting and stopping, although it does run in background 24/7. It is better as discerning car and bus travel than the first few weeks of use. Nothing like seeing my average speed of 50+mph! You can manually change the results.

You can do that with user defined settings. The user can set a time period and if the app does not detect any change in the data coming from the GPS or speed/cadence sensor, it can stop the ride through code. Having an app auto start and stop an activity for you isn't really practical but it can be done. Having an auto start/stop feature in a cycling app, in my opinion, will most likely not be ON very long once the user's rides get screwed up because the user didn't do certain things needed for the feature to work correctly. It's probably the opinion of the app developers, as well, and another reason they're aren't any apps with that feature.

[MENTION=67936]John V[/MENTION], that's my point, and that's why it's a bad idea for a feature. It seems good on the surface, but when you look at the problems implementing it and the resulting problems, it's not worth it. Use your app like a stopwatch. Try to remember. In time, you get a habit of doing it and you don't lose many rides as a result of forgetting to hit start or stop. At least, that's been my experience.

Exactly. Great idea but details of implementation are the problem.

Some apps have the capability to warn you if they start seeing wheel or cadence data when the app hasn't been started. My Edge 1000 also has the capability.

J.

Nonsense. If my bluetooth sensors are registering movement over some small threshold of time, start recording. Stop after the sensors stop.

The only problem I see is that the iOS might not have a way to trigger apps when data starts coming in, meaning the app will have to be constantly running in the background to perform periodic polls. iOS does have mechanisms to allow applications to do this, and the iPhone 7 has low-power CPUs that could make the battery drain negligible.

It's not simple, but both hardware and software necessary to make it robust are in place.

The problem here is that each time you stop for a traffic light or for a break, rather than pause, your ride will stop. This will cause a new ride to start when you start moving again. Both GPS units and phone apps have an auto pause feature that work that way but they don't stop the ride id you're not moving. It's why you have to manually start and stop a ride with the current systems out on the market.

GPS, on the other hand, is constantly receiving and sending data to the comm port. On a phone, it does it the entire time you have the phone turned on even if you don't have any apps accessing it. The same thing goes for a GPS computer. Once you turn on the power, the GPS connects to the satellites and sends the data to the com port. So if you don't have any sensors connected to your GPS computer or phone app, the ride will never end until you power off the device.

Obviously there would be thresholds, just like with auto-pause features. This is not rocket-science. I don't even need GPS. Here's one heuristic: after my sensors stop talking to the phone for 10 minutes, go back to the last time they recorded a move and call that the end of the ride. Poof, done.

No, I assume the real reason this doesn't exist is there aren't enough nutso commuters like me that want to track every ride and are too lazy to press the start/stop button.

I've got every ride of mine in the last decade in a database. About 3500 for around 33,000 miles, 10,000 of them touring miles :-).

(I do realize that these are low numbers for some of you.)

Designing machine-human interfaces that are intuitive to the human IS hard science. You try it. You'll see.

Just write some pseudo code for how it would behave, and we can find flaws that would infuriate a lot of users.

So on your route to wherever you're going, you get a flat tire. For whatever reason, it takes you longer than 10 minutes to fix it. Your computer doesn't get any signals from the sensor(s) and ends the ride. You fix the flat and move on and the computer starts another ride. As you continue, you pass a convenience store and decide to stop and get a cup of coffee. You go to the bathroom while you're there and stay more than 10 minutes. Computer ends the ride and starts another one when you continue. You now have turned one ride into three. If you've ever done any software development, the first thing you quickly learn is that theory is much, much easier than implementation.

I'm comfortable w/ a 10-minute threshold, I can combine tracks/trips on the few occasions this would matter.

And I teach computer science, and have a decent grasp of both theory and practice.

It seems the wheel rotations sensors send data even when they are not moving. They go into a "sleep" mode after a "long" period of activity.

If that's the way they work, one could use a wheel rotation sensor to allow a smartphone app to automatically detect that you on a bike ride.

Ah, that's good, so you know what you're dealing with. You'll need some expertise in human factors, too, because Joe Average will get pissed off with a ten-minute timeout. Then Jane Not-so-average will want it to be two minutes. Except on some days, she'll want it to be longer.

And combining rides, how easy is that with those GPS tracking files? I have no idea.

Simple XML hierarchies if you want to do it by hand, or use gpsbabel.

"No", I didn't establish this thread to convince you of anything, I am simply seeking information.

No, I don't. Who does?