WahooMurray wrote:
We would love for you to try out the new firmware and give us feedback. Initially it would be great if you could just update the firmware, do a spin down and compare the results to your power meter, ie don't link you power meter to the KICKR, we would love to hear how the raw numbers look.
Over the last 3 days I have done 3 rides on my KICKR with TrainerRoad. In each ride I have been recording the data from the KICKR through TrainerRoad as well as from my Garmin Vectors on a Garmin 810 head unit. As requested, I evaluated 3 different scenarios:
Ride A: Old firmware, no ANT+ control of KICKR
Ride B: New firmware, no ANT+ control of KICKR
Ride C: New firmware, ANT+ control of KICKR
Ride A was a 60 minute ride. I first did a static calibration of the Vectors, then did a 15 minute warm-up, then did a spindown of the KICKR (I did not write down the spindown information as this workout was before the new firmware was released). The data presented below is all taken after the spindown (so the last 45 minutes of the workout).
The graphs show the power-duration curve for the KICKR and Vector (top) and the difference in the power-duration curve (bottom). The dashed lines in the top graph show the 3% error bars. The fact that the error bars for the KICKR and Vector do not overlap shows that the difference in their values is more than 6%. The average difference (indicated by the dashed red line in the bottom graph) is around 30 watts (with the KICKR reading high).
I installed the new firmware and repeated the experiment from Ride A, although I did a different workout. Once again I did a static calibration of the Vectors, did a ~15 minute warm-up, then did the KICKR spindown. The spindown offset was 416, spindown time was 29.25 seconds, and the reported temperature was 30.13 C. The data in the below chart is once again taken after the spindown.
Once again, the error bars do not overlap, indicating that the error between the KICKR and Vector is more than 6%. However, the average error decreases from ~30 watts to ~22 watts, an ~8 watt improvement.
In Ride C, I configured the KICKR to be controlled by the Vectors using the newly introduced functionality in the KICKR firmware. For this ride, I show the watts over time to illustrate how it went.
The reported power for both the KICKR and Vector were pretty similar in the beginning. However, after about 13 minutes (vertical purple dashed line), the Vector power jumped up a few watts (this increase was small enough that I didn't notice it during the workout, I only noticed it later when I analyzed the data). Then, the power really jumped at the 23 minute mark (vertical brown dashed line). I definitely noticed this increase and for the rest of the workout I had to use the up/down arrows in TrainerRoad to adjust the target watts to achieve the desired resistance as measured by the Vectors.
I did a fourth workout tonight where I was only recording the Vector data so I do not have any comparative data to show. However, my experience was similar to Ride C where the data did not quite match up.
I am happy to provide the raw data files if anyone is interested.