ANT Forum

Hi There, Is it possible to set the ANT ID to a fixed value to enable pairing with a Garmin USB stick - rather than using the scan function which is the std process with the Garmin Ant agent?

I am having trouble pairing to my Rotor power crank, for some reason it works fine with my Garmin 810, but will only connect if I manually enter the sensor ID in the head unit.

I now want to connect to it via a Garmin USB to upgrade the firmware but as the Garmin Ant Agent only scans for devices I can't seem to connect. Is there a way I can fix the ID or can I use Antware to pair with the device?

Thx for your help,      

Are you trying to use Garmin ANT Agent to update the firmware on the Rotor power meter? Since the power meter is not a Garmin product, it is unlikely that this is possible - please contact Rotor for details on how to upgrade the firmware on their unit.

If you are using another application to do this, please make sure to close ANT Agent so that the second application has access to the USB stick.      

Thx for your response. Rotor have a piece of software which enables the firmware upgrade to take place but it relies on a pair existing between your PC and the crank. They recommend using the Garmin Ant agent to make this connection - this is the bit I cant get to work.

It possible to use the ANTware II software to pair the USB 2 stick with the crank. If so, can I set the serial ID as a fixed number rather than getting the USB to scan for Ant enabled items to pair with?

Thx again      

Sharing one USB stick with Rotor ANT+ application and Garmin ANT(-FS) agent may give unpredictable results. I.e Garmin ANT agent will send the reset command to the ANT chip when starting, and this will terminate/close all channels that other software may be using. The Garmin ANT-FS agent is listening for a LINK broadcast on ANT-FS frequency 2457 MHz on a separate network than ANT+ used by Rotor which is broadcasting on 2450 MHz.

It should be possible to use low-level ANTWARE II to scan for your Rotor device to see the broadcast with power data (in raw byte form). You must set up network 0 with the ANT+ network key and also you must configure the shared slave channel with the sensor ID of your rotor device, as well as the ANT+ channel frequency at 2450 MHz. The sensor ID that transmitted is the same as the device number in the channel Id, you can set device type and transmission type to 0 for wildcard search. How the broadcast should be intepreted is defined by the ANT+ power profile specification.

     

Re "Rotor have a piece of software which enables the firmware upgrade to take place but it relies on a pair existing between your PC and the crank.":

That sounds a bit weird. There's no such concept as a pair between a PC and an ANT device.
"Pairing" takes place between a piece of software and an ANT device. So Software 1 (e.g. ANT Agent) pairs individually, as does Software 2 (e.g. Rotor software).

Btw, "pairing" as of your post is not clear to me:
First kind of "pairing" in the ANT world: the PC searches for "any device of a given type" (e.g. power meter) and remembers that device's individual id for subsequent connections.
Second kind of pairing: for devices that support file transfer ("ANT-FS"), a real pairing can take place. You have to enter device B's key into device A's keyboard during pairing - much like in the Bluetooth case.

Cheers,
OMB