![]() They worked like no other powermeter – dual BLE connections. They were the well engineered powermeter pedal option nobody bought. In fact, adoption was so poor with those pedals that you can now get ANT+ pods for them. When I used the Polar V800 in 2015 it still did not support any BLE powermeter correctly that wasn’t the Polar Look Pedals. Polar started talking about BLE before 2010 according to blogs and forum posts. A quick search for Polar protocol reveals W.I.N.D, 9khz, 5khz (the actual one), “ownlink”, BLE, Nike proprietary partnership (for Nike Run watches), and then I quit. The last few years this has caused so many headaches. I don’t know why but in hindsight, if they knew how it would hurt their company, I doubt they would have done this. However, when things unified under ANT+ they said no. There are still heart rate monitors that use Polar’s very old analog low frequency (khz) transmitter. It was so common that gym’s used some of the variants of it’s technology and it’s still in use today. Polar had been the king of making watches and heart rate monitors for a long time. So people don’t have a simple unified way to check their products in the BLE space.Īround the time BLE was emerging there was one company in the sports world that didn’t adopt ANT+. This has gotten better, but it’s still an order of magnitude greater so still most people ignore it. Those same people would have to go without there base model Tesla model S base model to do the same with BT. ANT+ on the other had – well, most middle income americans could afford membership and certification by going without a new TV or the latest macbook. When they didn’t pay them they couldn’t participate. It’s licencing and certification fees were so high most companies just didn’t implement it correctly or pay them. And this is where BLE could have killed ANT+ but didn’t because it fumbled. The big money maker for BLE is not sports. So Apple leads with the phone for all – except every few iOS versions they take more BLE functionality under it’s control and breaks apps.ĪNT+ had been around for years unifying powermeters, heartrate monitors, foot pods, speed, cadence, combined spd/cad and other less known sensors. Now every Mac has BLE and standard iPhone like coding API and Windows is such a mess that if software supports BLE, sometimes it’s only on one type of USB BLE adapter (Shout out to Trainerroad for trying with the Bluegiga BLED112). The iPhone emerged and was, as far as I recall, the first device to have BLE in iPhone 4 (or was it 4s?).Then the overwhelming adoption of Android (complete with flaky BLE that still has teething pains in the splintered Android ecosystem) two things have happened. ![]() So how did we get to this BLE mess of “the next version will crush it”. It was remarkably similar in some ways to ANT+ and yet functioned completely different – but it was really for phones. Other motivations and some time meant BLE emerged. But even 20ma was too much for sensors and most companies, The power consumption was too high for a coin cell. Just remember the pairing code is either 1234 or 0000. It allowed keyboards and mice and a huge number of other devices to work wirelessly without too much problem. It allowed you to talk hands free to your car and then allowed for terrible BT audio, and then after people complained, decent BT audio. Smart phones had Bluetooth, with it’s 20 – 40 ma draw. The last is Shimano shifting - there is a generic and open shift profile used by SRAM and Campagnolo so that doesn’t even matter anymore. 3 are proprietary – except that two will become ANT+ standards based on those two Garmin exclusive products thus opening the floor for competition. There are 14 (really 12) sensor types in my 520. In fact the life blood of the sales of Garmin is other people’s sensors. It was enough of an innovation to attract the attention of Garmin to purchase the company / protocol – and thus ANT+ was in the hands of a corporation to be locked down and…. The group that did found themselves in the right place at the right time with the right technology. It was inevitable that someone would step forward and create a simple 2.4GHz protocol to unify things. If you want to see backlash on standards look at the Ray Maker Kurt Kinetic Smart trainer preview and read the comments. Proprietary protocols, no standards, analog sensors, or secret standards. It’s revising without adoption (4.3, 4.2, 4.1, 4.0).Users don’t understand the sensors can only talk to ONE device. I asked an industry expert and the world and got some new responses, but mostly the same. The short is BLE could, but several it seems that around every corner companies fumble it. ![]() Normally I’m asked “which should we support” which I have a better answer for – both. Recently (okay, like weeks ago) I was asked why hasn’t ANT+ been completely crushed by BLE.
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