Would this board work with the code that's been developed?

[piva...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Thanks in advance for the help.

Would this board be able to run the ant-api?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3406

Thanks!

-Philip

[Curtis Malainey]

Hello Philip,

That board "could" work, but the work required would likely not be worth it. The board is currently loaded with a non-ANT softdevice for the radio. That would would have to be changed by adding the debug headers to the board and using a j-link programmer to load the board with one of the soft devices from thisisant.com. This would likely break the application that adafruit has loaded and you would need to modify it (memory boundaries and such). The second issue is that I have barely started implementing the API for native access (i.e. talking to the softdevice on the same board) which is how it would be used here. The library only supports serial access through the ANT network processor firmware currently.

Personally, I have managed to get the ANT softdevice loaded on the nRF52-DK board, and it was not a pretty experience, which is why I have put off native API usage in the library. Given the legal barriers in providing the soft device directly, this part of the driver will likely remain a backburner task. I am looking to get some breakouts and shields designed and put them on something like seeed or github so people can order them so people can breakout ANT radios really easily in the future. Currently I'm just using the N5 series development kit from dynastream and breaking out the pins via the BAT board and it working fine for now.

Hope that answers everything.

Curtis

[piva...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I can't thank you enough for your complete reply!

Totally understand and I will look to use a two board solution.

What I'm trying to do is use the Arduino as a bridge between a set of power meters (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1468298434/cycling-power-meter-at-a-breakthrough-price?ref=user_menu) and an electric bike controller that does not have ANT or BLE built in.

http://www.ebikes.ca/learn/pedal-assist.html

It does have a torque input (variable voltage) so this is what I would output on the Arduino as a function of the power output on the peddles.

Unfortunately, the bike I want to use this on is not able to use any of the simpler solutions proposed on this page.

So the question now becomes... Would the stack be able to communicate read the power information from these peddles?

Thanks!

-Philip

[Curtis Malainey]

Hey Philip,

That sounds like it should work no problem. I can't speak to the electrical control aspect of pedal assist but the ANT side should be no problem.

This stack is absolutely capable of handling the information. This library has a sister library called antplus-arduino where I have implemented other ANT+ profiles such as Heart Rate, Environment, and Bicycle Speed. The bike power profile is fairly advanced but it looks like it should work fine. If you run into any issues and you think it might be a bug in the library please let me know and I will do my best to fix it asap.

If you have an ANT stick, you can download Simulant to do some testing against with your project. This is how I Simulate devices I don't own for testing purposes with my libraries.

Curtis