Monday night I went out on a ride that had the primary purpose of getting my atrophied muscles some exercise. A side benefit was it also gave me a chance to test out a route tracing iPhone application. In yesterday’s post, I talked about the success of my primary goal. Today, I’d like to share my initial observations about the secondary one.

I’m not that excited about adding one more piece of technology to my bike. I find my Quarq CinQo powermeter and Garmin Edge 500 to be enough. Sure, I haul my cell phone around with me for that just in case need. However, that doesn’t have to do so much with my ride as it does with if I suddenly stop riding!

While making my plans for the 2010 Ride for Mike, I always intended it to be an interactive affair. That phone back there would play more of a role in that trip. The plan is to stop along the way and use my iPhone to send tweets out about my progress. With the iPhone 4, I’ll also able to take some HD video… if I happen to have anything worth catching on video.

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could use the iPhone to allow people to follow me on my route in real time.  I started looking an application that could do it. Right now, the closest I have come is the Cyclemeter by Abvio. At least I know that it will track my route… whether it will allow people to follow me as I ride or if it will only allow them to see after I’ve finished is the question.

The application sends out a tweet when you start with a link to a map. I’m told that it updates my position every 5 minutes. So, my assumption is that if you click on the link during the time of my ride, you will see my progress within five minutes or less of that time. I’ve yet to test that part of it.

Of course, my greatest concern is with the AT&T network. The iPhone application might do a great job collecting the positioning data, but that doesn’t do me any good if I can get it up to the Web! My understanding is that the Cyclemeter software compensates for this by buffering until if finds a connection.

Then I wonder about the GPS accuracy. This isn’t as big of a deal, but consider these two maps from my Monday night right. The first is the one generated by my Garmin Edge 500. The second one is from the Cyclemeter software.

At first glance, the Cyclemeter route looks identical.

Look closer and you will see that the Garmin GPS read a much tighter route than the iPhone one. Now, neither of them stayed dead on during the ride, but the iPhone one was a bit more wacky at times.

The Garmin data is much prettier…

It looks like this is the approach I’m going to have to take. I wish there was an ANT+ connection to the iPhone so that I could port the Garmin data through my iPhone to a server on the internet and display even more information from my ride. Still, this is about the investment I’ll need to make considering how many people will (or, more to the point won’t) be following my progress.

Do you use the Cyclemeter? Can you give me some advise? What type of battery life do you find you get? I’d also like to connect with some folks who would be willing to check in with me on my next ride. I’ll let you know when I plan the test and you can click on the link of the tweet that is sent out. We can figure out how it works together!

By the way, here are the links to the actual Google Maps routes that were generated Monday evening.

• Cyclemeter
• Garmin

Finally, if you want to see what I would REALLY like to have for the 2010 Ride for Mike, check this out! Maybe The Worthwhile Company could do something like this for me next year!

 

Tags: Cyclemeter, Garmin Edge 500, iPhone 4

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 5:59 am and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.