Recently people way smarter than I (Ray Maker (dcrainmaker) and Shane Miller (gplama) among others) have been pontificating on the problems within Zwift as a serious e-gaming platform, especially where it concerns cheating. And during my casual YouTube scrolling tonight it occurred to me that cheating with your weight is only the start of the problems.
Cycling Hub appears to have developed some sort of test harness where they can have a rider lock into any power or cadence. At first I thought they used a Kickr or somesuch and that I'm just weak because I can't do a loop of Watopia at 400W.
But then they had a descent down L'Alpe at 2000(!!)W:
.
(The embedded player doesn't seem to like the start time on the link. Go to 5'52")
Needless to say, that can't be done by a human. So what I think they did is the following: They developed a little program that basically pretends to be an ANT+ power meter. This isn't that hard; the ANT+ protocol is open so you can exactly look up what the flow of data should look like. You probably need to plug in the proper vendor IDs but that's also not hard. You use the same libraries Zwift and TrainerRoad use to receive data on an ANT+ dongle to send data.They can probably set a power and cadence value and just start broadcasting. Zwift thinks it's a powermeter and hey presto.
And that got me thinking - what if you refine that, and make the power controllable, maybe using a joystick or the arrow keys? You can superimpose some random noise over the user selected power to make it look more like a real cyclist, but I think there's nothing stopping you from entering into a race with such a "powermeter".
And then I got even more clever: What if you read in the power data of a real powermeter over bluetooth, and then send it out over ANT+ (like those protocol converter things you can buy), but allowing the user to dynamically inflate the power, basically emulating unlimited powerups? You could have various types to make it look real - you can have for example a "5 second attack" button giving you 5 seconds of 1000W, a "drop the hammer" button giving you 10 minutes of 120% of what you're really doing, an "I suck a sprinting" button giving you 30 seconds of, I don't know, 1300W, etc, etc.
Again, this is not hard. All you need it is a computer, an ANT+ dongle, and coding skills. If I wasn't pathologically lazy and uninterested in cheating I could probably develop a proof of concept in a week or so.
Citizen of the world, former drunkard. Resident Traumatic Brain Injury advocate.
Cycling Hub appears to have developed some sort of test harness where they can have a rider lock into any power or cadence. At first I thought they used a Kickr or somesuch and that I'm just weak because I can't do a loop of Watopia at 400W.
But then they had a descent down L'Alpe at 2000(!!)W:
.
(The embedded player doesn't seem to like the start time on the link. Go to 5'52")
Needless to say, that can't be done by a human. So what I think they did is the following: They developed a little program that basically pretends to be an ANT+ power meter. This isn't that hard; the ANT+ protocol is open so you can exactly look up what the flow of data should look like. You probably need to plug in the proper vendor IDs but that's also not hard. You use the same libraries Zwift and TrainerRoad use to receive data on an ANT+ dongle to send data.They can probably set a power and cadence value and just start broadcasting. Zwift thinks it's a powermeter and hey presto.
And that got me thinking - what if you refine that, and make the power controllable, maybe using a joystick or the arrow keys? You can superimpose some random noise over the user selected power to make it look more like a real cyclist, but I think there's nothing stopping you from entering into a race with such a "powermeter".
And then I got even more clever: What if you read in the power data of a real powermeter over bluetooth, and then send it out over ANT+ (like those protocol converter things you can buy), but allowing the user to dynamically inflate the power, basically emulating unlimited powerups? You could have various types to make it look real - you can have for example a "5 second attack" button giving you 5 seconds of 1000W, a "drop the hammer" button giving you 10 minutes of 120% of what you're really doing, an "I suck a sprinting" button giving you 30 seconds of, I don't know, 1300W, etc, etc.
Again, this is not hard. All you need it is a computer, an ANT+ dongle, and coding skills. If I wasn't pathologically lazy and uninterested in cheating I could probably develop a proof of concept in a week or so.
Citizen of the world, former drunkard. Resident Traumatic Brain Injury advocate.
Last edited by:
Richard Blaine: Mar 6, 19 18:59