Last Updated on January 11, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Since several years, we were reviewing how to access sports sensor data, and how to stream it in an application for data processing. We started our reviews on our GITHUB page:
https://github.com/PeterGamma/Live-stream-of-ANT-plus-and-BLE-sensor-data
and in the EEVBLOG. We created a GITUB page for downloading code from Niels Knielings LiveTracking.io, which would allow to stream sensor data over ipBike livetracking.io to InfluxDB and visualize the data in Grafana. Infortunately, this option was gone temporarily, newer option appeared. We only used our GITUB to write issues, and we did not download any code yet.
We hardly received any answers to our reviews, but several new solutions appeared which where interesting for us personally. One of those was the Adafruit Pylothon BLE Bike Computer.
For us, it was clear, that this code solves our problem. But do we have to go down to this code level? We reviewed all the different options and did not decide yet.
The Instruction from the Panzerband Engineer with the Apple watch looks relatively simple:
But the instruction does not show a real-time stream, depends on a iPhone app, and is also limited to sensor data which are supported by Apple Health.
Furthermore, the Panzerband Engineer deleted our comments in his YouTube video, in which we expressed that we are very happy about his instruction. We do not know the reason for this deletion. Therefore, we withdraw the award we gave to him and give him one star less.
The instruction in Spanish by “Cómo integrar Strava en Home Assistant” by Tecnoyfoto let s us conclude that there is an option available to stream sensor data over Strava to Home Asssistant. But we do not know of any community which uses this option.
We became interested in the Xiaomi Treadmill, which can be controlled by a computer, and there are several treadmill BLE sensors available to measure the treadmill speed, and also great instruction to calibrate and increase the accuracy are available. For this, a connection of this sensors to a PC is required.
We finally come back to the Adafruit Pyloton Bike Computer as a backbone of our development. The computer support heart rate, speed and cadence, but the cadence sensor can be replaced by a foot pod. The Adafruit Computer is not connected to a sensor processing application. But we can connect it for instance to InfluxDB. How to do this the easiest way can be found on this site.T
The Adafruit Open Source Bike Computer solves a problem which we have since several years at a very fundamental level.
The Adafruit Computer uses BLE standard sensors, but does not connect them to a PC application. This application can be InfluxDB or Home Asssistant.
If we want to develop our own project, we might choose InfluxDB, if we are looking for a community, we might choose Home Assistant. We are convinced, that there will be integrations for Home Assistant for sports sensors sooner or later which can be downloaded, which will find friends all over the world.
The Xiamo Treadmill which can be controlled from a PC is a good example for this, which has already started in the HA community. Adding treadmill sensors to it, which support standard BLE protocol and use the foot pod protocol, and we can create a high precision treadmill which allows to do experiments with it, or also allows us to calibrate foot pods, if the calibration of the treadmill is reliable.
We only found Xiaomi treadmills which supports speeds up to 15 km/h. It is highly desirable, that more treadmills are supported by the features we have discussed here.
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