As if I were lacking on the toy front, last night I picked up a Garmin Edge 305 bicycle computer. I'd been looking for a GPS data logger for a while, and this one is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. In addition to the time/lat/long/elevation track points, it also has a heart rate monitor and a cadence/wheelspeed sensor which is also correlated to the track points. This yields more data than you can shake a stick at.
I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to approach the problem of extracting, storing, and visualizing all this data, but I've got some ideas. The data is a superset of what I already track with my bike dashboard (by design), so I'll continue to use that as a base, just with the ability to drill down into more detail per ride. Wheeeee!
I also fixed a rounding error in one of the dashboard's view definitions that artificially inflated mileage (and therefore average speed) throughout the app. I'd misaligned my CAST AS DECIMAL and ROUND calls, and ended up rounding at the wrong spot. The raw data was uncompromised, only the view's computations based on it were affected.
Fun stuff. I've been thinking about the same model, but the ForeRunner version. I do some running too and would be able to go back and forth that way.
Which makes me think I could actually use the Bicycle Dashboard to put in running data too. Just define a new bike as Nike. :)
Yeah, one of the things I will be changing on the dashboard is to convert 'bike' to 'transport' or something, and then have categories. Because I want to put my motorcycle trips in too, just to record them.
see http://www.motionbased.com for some ideas. a flex/AIR app like that would be sweet.
Paul,
Yeah, MotionBased is a partial driver for what I envision. It's completely missing aggregated stats though, which are rather more important to me than the single activity stuff. Which isn't to say I don't want to know about individual rides, but seeing larger trends is my main interest. The individual stuff is more about having a lot of cool (and relevant) data to play with and visualize in cool ways.
AIR's flat out – no Linux support. I'll keep using Flex for the visualization pieces I'd imagine, but the core UI might move to HTML. It's SO much easier to work with. Have to really understand what I want to be able to do, and then pick the best tech for the job.
i think you get that kind of functionality w/the paid subscription (i'm too cheap). i'm using a forerunner 205 & it's s/w (training center) does much of what i want for stats w/a spreadsheet doing the rest but i'm mainly obsessed w/single rides anyways–though these days i've been doing intervals & simply counting the speed spikes & their flatness. i haven't seen much improvement (except sprinting away from farmer's dogs) after 3 weeks. my century time's worse than before i started & last week i couldn't even finish one (came up 15km short).
The Training Center stuff isn't too bad. But no extensibility. One of the stats I'm most interested in is comparing cadence vs. speed vs. heartrate plots. For example, is it better to go over some segment X at 20 mph, is it better to be pushing a cadence of 80 or 90? Or if I want to climb hill Y with a heartrate of 170 bpm, what's the best speed/cadence ratio (and therefore gearing).
There's so much to learn about what's happening, and what's really nice is that the dimensions are both easily enumerated and traced, which means the data mining side is straightforward (though not simple or trivial). It'll be fun.
you need a sports medicine checkup for that sort of stuff (if you're *that* serious but you can guesstimate quite a bit of that). i've been trying to follow the advice here:
http://www.cptips.com/intervl.htm
http://www.ultracycling.com/training/training.html
http://www.ultracycling.com/training/century.html
we cheat a bit over here, our "centuries" are in kilometers ;-)
btw what's your MB handle? mine's http://coldfusionpaul.motionbased.com/
You metric cheater. Hmph. ;) I'm gonna see about doing a statute half century next month. I got started late in the season, so I'm playing it easy.
My MB account is at http://bboisvert.motionbased.com/. Not much there yet, and I botched up a couple of activities by forgetting to reset between. I'm hoping to totally supplant it with my own stuff, but we'll see. At the very least provide some aggregation stuff that it doesn't provide.
it took me a couple of years to crack 100km (mind you i'm still riding a mountain bike though i tricked it out a bit w/malvic rims & hutchison tires–the tires are nice & light but wear fast & get punctured way too easily–and i lost 6++ months when i dumped my bike into a canal & blew out my right knee). i spend 90% of my time on country/farm roads these days so i'll switch to a real road bike as soon as i can bring myself to spend that kind of money on a "hobby" (decent road bikes here are expensive & the choice is pretty limited though trek has a "starter" that looks like a good value).