Bluetooth Charts For Disconnects, FTMS Resends and Trainer Resets

Release Notes 2022-02-24 - Bluetooth Charts for Disconnects, FTMS Resends and Trainer Resets

Well, this is awkward. I made and update to Zwiftalizer today, and then suspended my Zwift membership to support Luciano Pollastri who had his membership suspended by Zwift for writing a blog post about how easy it is to cheat in races using an exploit that has Zwift has known about for two years, and Zwift being Zwift, did absolutely nothing about it (and still haven’t, but they demanded he take down his post, quick as a flash).

My payment renews in a few days, and I didn’t feel like giving money to a company who is so quick to force a fan to take down their content, yet so slow to fix issues with their product. I’ve subscribed up to Rouvy in the meantime. I’m doing sets of intervals at the moment so won’t miss the social aspect or races on Zwift. Anyway, here’s what’s new in Zwiftalizer this month.

I have added tool tips to all the charts. I read a few comments online from people who don’t know what they are looking at. That is fair. All the charts really are is a group and pivot of the entries in the log file. Explaining how to read each chart was a good suggestion. I found it harder to write concise tooltips than writing code. To make sure my assumptions are correct, I read a lot about ANT+ and Bluetooth protocols. I also had to make several assumptions about the UDP data and what the World Clock Offset is about. If you see errors, please let me know.

• Added three new charts: Bluetooth disconnects, Bluetooth FTMS resends, Bluetooth trainer resets.

• Bluetooth disconnects - These are drop outs. This chart shows times when a Bluetooth device disconnected and needed to be repaired. This event happens for a single device, but unfortunately it’s not possible to tell from the log entries which device it was (the UUID in the disconnect error does not align with a paired device entry). Bluetooth has an advantage over ANT+ here because each device gets reconnected individually, whereas with ANT+, a device disconnect triggers reconnection of all devices. This can cause momentary dropouts in devices that were otherwise working fine (depending on how quickly a device can reestablish a connection).

• Bluetooth FTMS resends - This chart shows times when the controllable trainer failed to receive a Bluetooth FTMS (FiTness Machine Service) resistance change message, and Zwift sent the message again. Resends are a feature of the Bluetooth FTMS protocol that improves responsiveness and reliability compared to ANT+ which does not have these capabilities.

• Bluetooth trainer resets - This chart shows times when the controllable trainer failed to receive a series of resistance change messages in a row and had to be reset. These messages usually follow a Bluetooth disconnect.

• I bundled up all the tooltips into a help page and added a link in the left menu.