Zwack BLE

Simulate/Implement a Bluetooth Low Energy sensor that can send:

Cycling Power and Cadence (CSP Bluetooth profile)
Running Speed and Cadence (RSC Bluetooth profile)
Cycling Power and Cadence (FTMS Bluetooth profile - partial support)

Zwack has many possible uses, here are some examples:

Simulate an indoor bike trainer (turbo) generating cyclist power,cadence & speed data to test bike computers fitness, or virtual indoor bike apps.
Simulate a runner's speed and pace test bike computers fitness, or virtual indoor bike apps.
Integrate a common treadmill with Zwift, sending data from the treadmill to the Zwift game via bluetooth
Simulate an indoor bike trainer (turbo) that is able to receive SetTarget (wattage) commands from test bike fitness apps (eg: BreakAway: Indoor Training) for testing. (This method is currently using the Cycling Power Profile with the addition of Wahoo's extension)

Supports

At this time Zwack runs succesfuly on Mac OSX (Please check Requirements below) and Raspberry PI. Should run on Windows but it hasn't been tested. If it works let me know.

Installation

Install from npm

npm i zwack

or clone this repo and run

npm install

You may need to install Xcode on Mac to compile the bleno Bluetooth module.

Debug Flags

You can see a lot of debug information if you run the simulator or your app with the DEBUG environment variable set to

csp - Cycling Power and Cadence messages
rsc - Running Speed and Cadence messages
ftms - Fitness Machine Messages
ble - Bluetooth low energy messages

Example:

DEBUG=rsc npm run simulator
DEBUG=* npm run simulator

You'll see something similar to this

rsc [Zwack notifyRSC] {"speed":4.4703888888888885,"cadence":180} +0ms
rsc Running Speed: 4.4703888888888885 +2ms
rsc Running Cadence: 180 +0ms
rsc [Zwack notifyRSC] {"speed":4.4703888888888885,"cadence":180} +1s
rsc Running Speed: 4.4703888888888885 +0ms

Using the simulator

Start the simulator by executing:

npm run simulator -- --variable=ftms --variable=rsc --variable=csp --variable=power --variable=cadence --variable=speed

On a different machine start your fitness app, bike computer or indoor virtual bike simulation software, like Zwift, and pair up the Zwack BLE sensor. The sensor name should be Zwack, it may have some numbers added to the name or you may see the host name of the computer running zwack. It all depends on the operating system you're uing to run Zwack.

If your indoor biking software does not detect the BLE sensor, disable, then enable, the Bluetooth on the machine where Zwack is running and retry to discover and connect to the sensor again.

The ZwackBLE sensor may show up as Zwack or has the host name of the machine running Zwack. This is normal.

Updating simulation parameters

List of Available Keys
  c/C - Decrease/Increase cadence
  p/P - Decrease/Increase power
  s/S - Decrease/Increase running/cycling speed
  d/D - Decrease/Increase running cadence  

  r/R - Decrease/Increase parameter variability
  i/I - Decrease/Increase parameter increment
  x/q - Exit

Pressing c on your keyboard will decrease the cadence, conversly pressing C (upper case) will increase simulated cadence. Same thing for power by pressing p or P.

The variability parameter will introduce some random variability to the cadence and power values, so they don't remain constant all the time. If you lower the variability to 0 the cadence and power values will remain constant.

Press x or q to exit Zwack.

Command Line Arguments

npm run simulator -- --variable=ftms --variable=rsc --variable=csp --variable=power --variable=cadence --variable=speed

ftms - enable broadcasting as FTMS service
rsc - enable broadcasting as RSC service
csp - enable broadcasting as CSP service
power - enable broadcasting CSP with Power only data
cadence - enable broadcasting CSP with Cadence data (to be combined with power)
speed - enable broadcasting CSP with Speed data (to be combined with power and cadence)

Requirements

Requires NodeJS, and should run in all Bleno (the base BLE module) supported platforms, which are Mac, Windows or Raspberry Pi.

Zwack cannot run on the same computer as the fitness or virtual indoor bike app, you'll need to run them on different systems.

If you have trouble getting BLE to work on MacOS, you can try to install bleno from abandonware using the command

npm install bleno@npm:@abandonware/bleno

Help Needed

Currently this version of zwack is able to broadcast and simulate a FTMS (indoor bike specifically) profile as well as Cycling Power (which also broadcasts Speed). The current implementation of Cycling Power (with Speed & Cadence) is NOT ideal. Cadence and Speed changes will be erratic

takes ~2 sec to stabilize and be reflected in output
will be unable to inject randomness into the output
will need help on how to improve it

Bugs / Feature Enhancement needed

I'm sure there are many bugs but as of now, it works and suits the purpose which is for testing as there are no simulators available for bluetooth (similar in form to simulANT).

Credits

Initial prototype based on ble-cycling-power code from olympum.

Codes for FTMS support is taken from the FortuisANT project and edited to fit usage as a simulator

mjunkmyjunk/zwack