Abilica Winrower 2.0 confirmed

[solmoller]

Just to let you know that Abilica Winrower 2.0 appears to be a very easy task to convert to Open Rowing Monitor.

I'll submit more data as I progress, but so far my main worry is that the reed switches are reading the driving wheel, not the flywheel. I suppose there are two reed switches on the Winrower so that the system differentiates back and forth on the driving wheel.

I might have to fit a new switch and a couple of magnets to read the flywheel, but that should be a very easy task.

The system has four impulses per revolution of the driving wheel in the left side of the picture, the flywheel is in the right side

So far the major problem was that I had to inspect the installation file to find out, that the software is installed in the directory /opt/openrowingmonitor. The documentation assumes that the user knows the install dir.

BR Henrik

[JaapvanEkris]

Thanks for reporting this back!

I've been thinking about the effects of this kind of monitoring. You can either keep the reed-switch as-is, and set the damper setting to something static in a way that the metrics start to make sense. The benefit is that it is easy to implement, but the disadvantage is that starting to row with more force isn't easily detected.

Another option indeed is adding measurement to the flywheel, which really upgrades your rower. One word of caution about that procedure: this isn't trivial. Most (cetrainly not all!) flywheels are balanced, so adding magnets might disturb that balance. The experience also is that reed-switches are quite vulnerable to decent placement of the magnets (the magnets should get pretty close to the reed switch). So using four magnets and placing them perfectly on each quarter of the flywheel (or just two) requires some planning.

If you need any help with finetuning the settings for your rower, please let us know.

[solmoller]

Two topics;

Firstly the Winrower is perfectly capable of calculating load from existing switches. If it can be solved in software, why change hardware? So I'll be working with one switch, and then if need be spend an entire GPIO pin to read the other switch, if, and only if one switch is not sufficient. The main issue is that my switch is triggered on both back and forward movement, and the software will probably look at the wrong half of the action, if it filters anything out. (Goes out and researches GPIO timing, seems better than ten years ago when last worked with it)

Secondly, I've spent the day trying to fill a gap in your ideas section:

• implement or integrate some rowing games
  With Scratch on the Rasbperry Pi it's actually pretty easy to build simple games, and make them use GPIO as input. We'll have something like the fish game on a Concept. I'm pretty far with the project, I'll probably have something playable by tomorrow

If that all works out, then I'll look into reading and changing the load setting on my Winrower, if that works, Winrower 3.0 is open source :-)