I have been creating a unicycle tracker for the last half year and want to get feedback. Just got back from NAUCC, where I got some great feedback from people. Attached are screenshots of 3 tabs: a new ride tab, a history tab, and a cadence tab. The cadence tab is really charts and data for how different cranks and wheel size will affect riding. I would appreciate feedback to create an app that suits the unicycling community. The profile tab asks for age, weight, experience level, and gives the choice of imperial or metric measurements.
I added a cadence sensor to eliminate faulty data from the GPS that gave absurd speeds and, therefore, cadence numbers. This addresses the very high speeds and cadences below and has given me very accurate data on recent rides. This is a common problem with Strava in my experience, when I ride a MUNI and see speeds over 20 mph from a completed ride.
There is also now a notes section in the current recording ride section and history section.
At the very bottom is how I am trying to create unicycle-specific effort numbers (power in watts).
Hi,
Very nice project and I would use it clearly if one day it came out.
One thing I like to check is my detailed pace per kilometer with the associated elevation gain/ loss.
I’d be very interested in this. Am currently logging on Garmin but obviously that lacks unique features for unicycles.
Speed/cadence sensors are relatively cheap and assuming they are BT or ANT+ are pretty interchangeable.
Would warn against Garmin cadence sensors as they are only designed to go up to 180rpm. Maybe a feature to treat a speed sensor as both a speed and cadence sensor would be useful for ungeared riding…
I like to be able to see simple graph reports, daily, weekly, monthly totals. maybe the ability to name and define particular equipment and select from a list. is this going to be phone only or phone/web interface. If it added extra features for Cycling, I would probably ditch Strava. (if it is going to add features for cycling, having a pike park feature that automatically deletes the lift miles and elevation would be stellar.
if you don’t have it already, I recommend adding a feature for saving settings for your unicycles and tracking miles on them. That way users won’t have to pick the crank length and wheel size every ride, and they’ll be able to see how many miles they’ve racked up
2-3x power consumption vs bike may be an overestimate. On my G36er, riding at a zone 2 HR, I usually average 11 mph. In the same zone (and same routes) on my bike, I average 15 mph.
Thanksfor the feedback. Great suggestion. I will put default ridership under profile. Also, power measurement observation is true. On flat vig wheel, efforts closer, but on hilly MUNI, effort gap increases. Cheers
Cool! The thing I would love for Muni would be an UPD-counter/detector, but that would probably need additional sensors that are not as easily available as a cadence sensor.
I have developed this on the side, not added it. Because a upd and dismount look the same to a phone, i am toying with a 2 factor setup, the upd matched with a viral response. The phone microphone turns on for three seconds after dismount of any type and if the rider say upd (updee) or any range of profanities, it get marked on the map as a upd at that spot. I am still working on other more essential issues, but will get to this after I have enough rides without any glitches.
I don’t know how hard it would be to detect but most of my current and past unis were doing a characteristic banging sound to the ground with some metallic echoing
This is something the unicycle community could really use. I use my garmin watch with the connect AP but I have to trick it to get it to respect my ride. if I log in as a bike ride it treats me like I’m diddling down a country road and stopping to pick flowers. if I log in as a run it treats me like it’s saying that a boy you really worked hard on this session keep up the good work. So I always log in as a runner, either way it’s not an accurate reflection of my unicycle ride. much like the whoop band it has categories for things I wouldn’t expect but nothing for unicycling.
Best wishes for your unicycling tracker development.
I have done some similar stuff in the past (2012 Open Street Map navigation tool, 2015 Pebble smartwatch fall detector, 2017 Apple app to record GPS details of trips with emails to observers and an associated server interface). The Apple app is no longer on the store, and I stopped paying my Apple developer fee, but I still use it occasionally if I need to give details of a planned social ride to others, or out of curiosity about a new route.
My app had much less to enter at the start of a ride than yours, but when I use it, I am usually too lazy to enter any details, and it is named as a trip from “somewhere” to “somewhere” by default. So, I reckon ease of use is vital - nobody wants others to wait while you have to fiddle with your phone on a group ride. And another small thing - it should be very difficult to accidentally do any unintentional stop or trip adjustment while the phone is in your pocket or bag.
If you really want it to be used by the unicycle community you would need an Apple and an Android version.
I agree with your approach to calculating a power estimate but personally I think it is pretty irrelevant, although I guess users might like to look at their history years down the track and pick out notable ride summaries (by effort, speed, distance, total ascent/descent).
And I guess some multi unicycle owners would like a chance to label a ride with the unicycle they were riding.
I don’t think you should make it dependent on a cadence sensor (a nice thing to have but presumably only a few riders have them), but I agree that a lot of effort needs to be put into GPS raw data (smoothing, adjusting from recent past and perhaps future GPS points, eliminating outliers based on unicycling expectations; maybe even adjusting by checking against map data).
UPD detection without non-GPS sensor data is very difficult, but maybe just counting stops and giving data about short stops and long stops would be useful and the short stops might be a hint that a UPD happened.
