Of course, you don’t need that fancy water bottle.
– Anker Portable USB charger (almost any portable USB charger will do) – K-Edge Mount (but any Garmin mount will work fine)Īnd here’s the parts for making your own DIY Water Bottle Charger: – SRAM quarter-turn adapter for Garmin mounts Then grab some epoxy and plunk it on the case. They’ve got instructions up on their site for making the handlebar mount for your phone, but basically you’ll buy the SRAM part below and just saw/grind off the back. But hey…you can never be too prepared for a multi-day power outage, right? It’s like bringing a blowtorch to light a single birthday candle. This particular 16,750mAh battery pack is most definitely overkill for charging the phone. Then inside they’ve got an Anker USB battery pack. Well, technically it’s not actually a water bottle, but rather one of XLAB’s toolkit bottles (I use a shorter version myself). Now this is basically just a take on their prior DIY handlebar project that glues a Garmin quarter-turn mount (by SRAM no less) to the bottom of a phone case.Įxcept next you’ll notice they’ve taken a black USB cable and gracefully slid it along the frame down to a water bottle that holds a battery. Perhaps a workout at the end of a long day with a low battery. This is perfect for when you want to have your phone on the bars but still keep it charged up. Not to mention the clean mounting of the unit itself. Scroll back up and you’ll have realized that the phone was actually plugged in the entire time, yet the cable looked near exactly like the shifting cables. Yes, hidden away on the frame was a water bottle charger for that phone.
In any case, all of this is available as of now, for which you can go forth and download here! There’s also an ‘and more’ line that should go up there to, but it’s pretty open-ended, as one might expect.
– Filtering workouts by power zone, duration, and intensity – Searching for and following training plans However, there are some features that are still upcoming (but exist on their other platforms) they include: The same goes for increasing workout intensity with just a touch of the button along the bottom. For example, you can see below the ability to get the textual updates for when workouts have additional instructions (like HTFU). Once in a workout you’ll get all the same stats and goodness as before. They will support it down the road, but they don’t have a specific timeframe for doing so. Note that the upcoming Kinetic Smart Control trainers are not supported at this time. The company supports the following devices today: For those handful of current generation phones that do not support ANT+ natively, you can use an ANT+ USB stick through an adapter pretty easily. The app will automatically take care of downloading any extra required ANT+ components for you.
– Support for Power Match (ability to control trainer using secondary power meter)īecause the majority of Android phones do support ANT+ FE-C (unlike iOS devices), the company is able to support this and other ANT+ devices natively on their app. – Support for Virtual Power (no power meter required)
– Support for Bluetooth Smart, ANT+, and ANT+ FE-C The company considers this a beta release, which initially supports the following features:
This new app version is supported on most Android devices as long as they are running Android 5 Lollipop or higher. Essentially, they devoted resources to this, rather than recent major new features on other platforms. More importantly though, the company sees it as the last final hurdle to having a cohesive app story moving forward in terms of adding new features. With Android now out the door, this completes the lineup of TrainerRoad apps on major platforms: Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. Like past TrainerRoad handlebar DIY creations, you might not even notice this one until I point it out. Oh, and I got to see their latest handlebar DIY creation. While at Interbike last week I got a bit of a tour of the new app, so I figure we’ll walk through that. Yup, you can wander on over and download the app and be off to the races with your favorite Android phone. It’s been a long time coming, but as of this very moment – TrainerRoad now has Android support.