Apple Watch app request (completed)

Ahhh, I see. This has nothing to do with your Elite bike trainer. You can test just with our app and the watch+heartcast. I also don’t have a Apple Watch.

hmm
yes it works to bring HR to the heartcast app on the phone, however i struggle to bring it to trainerday app. Any suggestions?

Oh now that I look a lot closer by reading their documentation and thinking about it, is I don’t think you can broadcast BLE HR from your phone and receive it on the same phone. It’s possible if you have 2 different iOS devices that you could connect your watch to say your iPhone and broadcast and receive the signal on your iPad for example, or on your M1 mac if you have one that our app works on. Again without us having a iWatch we can’t really test it and tell you. I will see if I can find any friends that would test this :slight_smile:

https://support.rouvy.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402922951569-Using-Apple-Watch-for-Heart-Rate

I didn’t know that…

So… looks like the answer is a No…

*NB - This applies to users who use/run the ROUVY App on their iPhones. To be able to use the Heart cast and Apple watch as HRM, you must have the ROUVY App installed on a different device e.g, Mac or Windows computer.

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I ordered an Apple watch for testing. I will see how hard it is for us to get it working natively in our app. There are two different ways to do this I see. One is to read from Apple Health and the other is read right from the watch but if you want to read right from the watch you must start a workout on the watch. I am thinking it would be nice to not start a workout on the watch and just open our app and start training and see the HR. I am not sure if there are any downsides to this approach.

I really appreciate your effort. If you find a solution let me know.

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I don’t want to ruin your day but there is very little chance that it will work.
The reason is that watches do not measure HR every second during the day outside of a workout. Starting a workout and/or activating broadcast starts sec by sec measurement.
Otherwise, the watch would run out of battery pretty quickly.
I have a Coros watch with the broadcast functionality and I first have to start a workout, then start broadcast.
If you can start broadcast and that triggers the watch to measure sec by sec, it should be possible.
For HR measurements outside a workout, the watches only measure once every x minutes during the day/night.

Oh I see, that totally makes sense. I see Apple watch has something called continous mode that does it every 5-seconds but wears down your battery faster. Looks like we would have to do it the right way.

:heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: Black Friday deals eh… Always wanted one, but I’m sticking w/ my Garmin (that the battery life is now close to charging each 2days :frowning:

Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around (only in the simulator) and managed to get the communication done. (workout is started on watch)

i also tried reading it from Apple Health, although i’m thinking thats slower (need to write to the phone DB, them app read from the DB - and it doesnt work on ipads which dont have Apple Health - at least for the older ones. i have an iPad mini 2 (2013) )

But as you cam tell from the gif, (look at the timestamp) even on workout mode, I’m getting HR every 5secs ¯_(ツ)_/¯ so I’m not sure if this is cos of simulator and will work on actual device (i dont own one and I dont have the $ to buy one). (im getting ever 5 sec too if reading from Apple Health for the record)

also, even on the simulator (or cos it’s the simulator), i’m still seeing like sub second update on the iphone…

It would have been great if one can simulate a HR and broastcast it as BLE (like heartcast - w/o going thru the phone)

Apple watch broadcasts heart rate into trainerday app but the problem is that it can do so only when connectwd to iphone thru heartcast so one needs two phones and the apple watch. Garmin watches newer ones broadcast heart rate over ble directly to trainer day app.

Concept2 ergdata app directly captures the heart rate data from apple watch. I am sure trainerday too can tweek the app to work on iphone and broadcast heart rate directly into trainerday app without heartcast and another iphone.

You would have to develop another companion trainerday app for apple watch like concept2 ergdata if trainerday is to caprure the heart rate directly from apple watch to the traineday app.

I hate charging stuff so my guess is I will keep using Garmin too but I want to test it, yes Black Friday deal :slight_smile: I don’t like smart watches (in concept, since I don’t have one) and have 99% of notifications off on my phone. Good job getting it working. We would probably develop an open source react native version if we can’t find one.

I hope that is not true. Seems like @app4g got it working without a separate watch app. Or maybe you mean real-time? Otherwise there is delay?

From what I can gather, Watch Apps can’t sync between Watch <-> iPhone. (cos I was thinking how to have things like elapsed workout time to be in-sync between watch and phone when both are running.

I did find a “mirror watch to phone” capability, but that’s mirroring and that basically needs a full (independent of phone) Watch App and the same app is not running on the phone.

The watch app above is a “companion app”, much like how the iphone can function as a companion app for Zwift on the Laptop. I guess it could also be coded such that one can Pause/Start/Resume/Skip Interval from the watch and then the command would get relayed to the phone.

It’s not a full fledged bicycle computer, for that, you would need a Full Watch App (independent of phone).

I saw from youtube that there is already the App “WorkOutDoors” and “CycleMeter” (I was using Cyclemeter exclusively for a couple years before giving up - due to battery life)

@Grip for the HeartCast app, do you notice any delay between the watch HR and the HR shown on the watch?

Looks like there is a (v slight) delay. Acceptable?

That was just my understanding based on concept2 ergdata. The apple watch does transmit heart rate into the trainerday app but requires an extra iphone one for connection to apple watch and transmission and other for trainerday.

Since HR is delayed 30-60 seconds from change in effort, I think a slight delay in HR makes no difference. Looks like this will work.

Looking at this video and heartcast it does not require special heartcast Watch app, they just say start activity. You might not be directly reading HR from watch but 1-second delay is fine. If you wanted to use heartcast it would require two devices but if we read Apple watch’s HR “signal” just like heartcast, that looks like it will work just fine. If we wanted to attempt to do HRV analysis or something, I assume it would require a direct connection.

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HRV is also available as part of the Data from HealthKit, apart from HR. And can also be transferred to the Phone.

I mean more like an HRV app, you might want to do your own real-time showing breath in vs breadth out hrv visuals. But thanks anyway, that’s all interesting stuff.

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