GC3.6: bluetooth, ble, windows 10, kurt kinetic... how to connect?

[Eric Christoffersen]

Borrowed my friends old kurt kinetic with inride pod so I can test the custom virtual power stuff.

Finally got a bicycle onto it today and I can't figure out how to connect to it:

My machine is a pc running windows 10.

Laptop has bluetooth4 hardware.

I can enable bluetooth in windows and windows can see the inride2 device.

Laptop also has a ble usb2 stick that I normally use to connect to my wahoo kickr.

I built the gc myself, is from latest sources (today) with qt 5.14.2. I can see there is bluetooth in my code because one time it crashed into bluetooth connection code in debugger once when I rudely turned off windows bluetooth.

I've tried disabling bluetooth on laptop and connecting over the ble stick under the first option: "ANT+ and FE-C" but nothing is found.

I've tried enabling laptop bluetooth and not connecting windows to the device, then creating a gc device under the second option "Bluetooth 4.0" and connection window finds nothing.

I've tried enabling laptop bluetooth and connecting to the inride pod, still gc bluetooth connection cannot see it.

Anyone got any ideas if/how I might be able to connect with golden cheetah?

Kurt Kinetic has instructions for apple desktop apps like zwift to connect to the inride pod over ble.

Thanks,

Eric

[Ale Martinez (Please don't email or cc me)]

This may help: https://github.com/GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah/wiki/FAQ-TRAIN#how-to-pair-btle-sensors

[Eric Christoffersen]

Ok. I know some stuff now about how connecting to bluetooth stuffs is supposed to work, at least with windows 10 and gc 3.6. And there are some dark clouds over my v2 kurt kinetic inride pod.

First, I can find no reason to setup a connection to a specific bluetooth device via windows settings. The devices are out there and golden cheetah will try and find and automagically connect to them, it doesnt care what windows has done. Some sites claim you shouldnt connect with windows but I played with devices connected to windows, and not connected, and it didn't seem to make any difference.

I have a wahoo cadence meter and it is seen by gc automatically via bluetooth.

The kinetic inride pod is being seen by gc.

GC attempts to do a 'service scan' of each available device in the area to see what it offers. It found an apple tv, a few iphones, some headphones... GC purports to magically find and use a reasonable selection of available services. I suppose this is A way to connect to bluetooth devices but its difficult for me to believe that this works well. Shouldn't gc make use of specific requested services from specific named devices? What stops gc from connecting to surrounding devices that it shouldn't? Can someone claim that this free-for-all works well in the wild? Or is it just a science experiment?

Stepping in debugger and watching the debug info I can see that my wahoo cadence meter advertises some BTLE services and lo! it is a CSC ("Cycling speed and cadence") which is some btle standard uuid for broadcasting data that gc knows how to use. And what do you know, it works and cadence info is displayed.

The kinetic inride on the other hand doesn't appear to advertise any btle services, let alone a csc, or a power service, or anything that gc knows how to read from. I found some angry verbage on the internet about this kurt kinetic inride pod, that it doesnt follow any standard btle software protocol, and from where I sit that looks to be true. My inride btle pod is the v2, there is a new one that is v3 that says its ant+, probably it would be ok but what I've got is a lone wolf btle device.

Thread here involving kurt engineer talking about how they dont follow a public btle convention:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2016/09/kinetic-smart-control-trainers.html/comment-page-1#comment-1682913

I downloaded a free bluetooth analyzer and can see the notifications the inride pod is sending, bunch of bytes. I guess if I want to play with this device I need to figure those bytes out. Or find someone thats already done it? Maybe I can email kurt and they will just tell me how to read the data? If I ask sweetly?

Its possible I've done everything wrong but it looks like there's currently no way to use an inride pod with golden cheetah train mode.

[Eric Christoffersen]

Ha, I emailed kurt and they didn't seem to understand are answered that what I wanted was impossible.

And then I searched a bit on github and found this:

https://github.com/kinetic-fit

So looks like that might work...