ANT Forum

Hi all,

I am working on an "intelligent" driver to make non FE-C cycling trainers FE-C enabled. To be more specific I target the Tacx Vortex and Bushido trainers more than 2 year old that are perfectly suitable to become FE-C compatible.

I'm undertaking this project because I feel very disappointed Tacx doesn't want to offer any sort of firmware upgrade to those who acquired pre ANT+ FE-C trainers.

So far I did reverse engineer the entire proprietary ANT+ protocol between the Tacx brake and the head unit as well as the head unit and the PC )

What I'm looking for at this point is documentation or code to help me make a virtual USB device driver such that a training software (ZWIFT, etc) will "see" an ANT stick while it is in fact my driver. That driver will in turn connect to the real USB stick providing all message translation.

By the way, I'm a software engineer trying to save time not having to dig the internet for how to write a virtual USB device driver.

Best regards to anybody who points me in the right direction.      

Hello LFrigon,

just saw your post and wanted to know did you come up with some solution?

I'm owner of Tacx i-Vortex T2160 and I'm also very dissapointed with them, but was wondering about easier approach and this would be to just enable power readings from my trainer.

Since I have both laptop and mobile, my idea was for laptop to read and transmit power through bluetooth and then read this on mobile phone as bluetooth power meter.

On the other hand - this is someting they could easily do in Tacx Trainer Software and solve problems of all of their old customers.

Btw, your idea was better.


Regards,

ElPaho      

Hi ElPaho,

I took a different approach to solve my problem. I wrote a proxy application such that Zwift sees it as a smart trainer (Tacx Neo for that matter). On the other side the proxy talks directly to the Vortex brake. The only downside is that my app requires an ANT dongle but it runs fine along with Zwift on the same PC given you have 2 ANT dongles.


     

Woow LFrigon,

this really blew my mind. Much more than I expected.
Your piece of software could make many many people happy. I'm training with TrainerRoad with virtual power that doesn't make sense when you have electric trainer like i-Vortex.

So, are you willing to share/sell your invention?


Regards,

Drazen      

Well... evenn though this is an old tread https://github.com/WouterJD/FortiusANT/ is a bridge with the same intention: link vortex to Zwift