How to display average power ratio in mission control?

[Ben J]

I know you can display "power ratio" but I expected there to be some kind of "trip average power ratio" like I had seen on Bosch units. I don't see it in the obvious place, but I thought I'd ask in case it has a weird name and I just didn't spot it.

(Power ratio being your contribution vs the bike's)

 

[Stefan Mikes]

It is doable Ben.

If you register your rides with Mission Control, please install a smartphone app named Specialized Ride. Then just open the Specialized Ride and go to Activities to see the list of your recorded rides. Select a ride. In the POWER section, you will see "Average Motor Power [W]" and the "Average Rider Power [W]". Divide the latter by the former and you have got the Power Ratio.

It is a little bit funny to use the Ride to analyse your Mission Control data but that's how you do it.

Not that I trust Mission Control data very much. Still, the Power Ratio calculated by Mission Control and displayed in Specialized Ride is about right.

 

[Ben J]

That's fantastic, thanks. Do you recommend recording from the Mission Control app as before or recording from the Specialized Ride app?

There are so many tools for looking at ".fit" files, it's pretty crazy. At least there's a standard! If you want to check the raw Mission Control data you can open a .fit file in a raw parser like https://www.fitfileviewer.com/ and look at individual rows. It's interesting to see the exact way it records data.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Do you recommend recording from the Mission Control app as before

Only that. Use the Ride as the .FIT reader.

 

[mschwett]

Only that. Use the Ride as the .FIT reader.

yep, this - ride does not record data from the specialized e-bike sensors. you won’t get anything other than GPS derived info if you record the ride using ride.

they should really merge the two into one app.

 

[Ben J]

Does anyone know what "adjusted rider power" is? I'm not sure what would adjust rider power.

 

[mschwett]

Does anyone know what "adjusted rider power" is? I'm not sure what would adjust rider power.

adjusted power is like normalized power, it attempts to take into account ups and downs in power to arrive at an equivalent steady state effort. if you ride at a completely constant power with no starts of starts they’d be the same.

as an example, if you rode hard for an hour at 240watts, but had to suddenly stop for one minute in the middle, the average power would only be 236 watts. but really it wouldn’t feel that much easier. the “normalized” power would be much closer to 240 than 236.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Let me tell you why I hate Mission Control and am glad I own older Specialized e-bikes allowing me to use the independent BLEvo app. Mission Control simply lies about my rides.

Let us take my May 1st, 2023 ride when I was using Smart Control, so Mission Control registered my ride:

• The distance by Wahoo (very accurately confirmed by Strava) was 101.33 km. The ride took 5 hours and 13 minutes net
• As my Vado has hard-coded wheel circumference of 2300 mm but the actual figure is 2255, the TCD-w display reported some 103+ km distance ridden, OK, I do understand
• Mission Control tells me I rode for 98.9 km, and I rode as long as 5 hours 50 minutes!

Mission Control also claims 545 Wh of the battery charge was used while I perfectly know the battery's real total capacity is 533 Wh, and the e-bike used only 485 Wh of the battery charge!

How on earth the TCD-w reports over 103 km but MC tells me it was well below 100 km?!

It is totally unexplainable. The only reason I use Mission Control is changing the e-bike settings and the Smart Control...

 

[mschwett]

Let me tell you why I hate Mission Control and am glad I own older Specialized e-bikes allowing me to use the independent BLEvo app. Mission Control simply lies about my rides.

Let us take my May 1st, 2023 ride when I was using Smart Control, so Mission Control registered my ride:

• The distance by Wahoo (very accurately confirmed by Strava) was 101.33 km. The ride took 5 hours and 13 minutes net
• As my Vado has hard-coded wheel circumference of 2300 mm but the actual figure is 2255, the TCD-w display reported some 103+ km distance ridden, OK, I do understand
• Mission Control tells me I rode for 98.9 km, and I rode as long as 5 hours 50 minutes!

Mission Control also claims 545 Wh of the battery charge was used while I perfectly know the battery's real total capacity is 533 Wh, and the e-bike used only 485 Wh of the battery charge!

How on earth the TCD-w reports over 103 km but MC tells me it was well below 100 km?!

It is totally unexplainable. The only reason I use Mission Control is changing the e-bike settings and the Smart Control...

i’m curious if the phone was in your bag, or on the handlebars and “always on” during this ride? i do not get great results from any GPS app with the phone in a pocket or bag. on the bars, it’s nearly perfect for me, whether mission control or other cycling apps. the only glitches are tunnels and similar. mission control seems to use GPS to calculate distance but the wheel sensor to calculate speed.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

i’m curious if the phone was in your bag, or on the handlebars and “always on” during this ride? i do not get great results from any GPS app with the phone in a pocket or bag. on the bars, it’s nearly perfect for me, whether mission control or other cycling apps. the only glitches are tunnels and similar. mission control seems to use GPS to calculate distance but the wheel sensor to calculate speed.

The phone was in my back pocket with its screen off for most of the trip. BLEvo has no issues of that kind... Never had.

When I switch the motor off for a longer stop or am walking away from the e-bike, Mission Control asks in panic whether I want to continue or terminate my ride. BLEvo just does not care and reconnects automatically whenever it finds the operating Vado in its range. Not a fan of Mission Control at all!

 

[Ben J]

i do not get great results from any GPS app with the phone in a pocket or bag. on the bars, it’s nearly perfect for me

I've also seen that, along with insane results when going through a tunnel near my house. The only way I can explain it is that losing signal in the tunnel makes the app think I stopped, and regaining makes it think I moved again very suddenly. I'll often get peak speeds through the tunnel (and the route will be reduced to a straight line between the ends) but that should be strictly slower unless there are other shenanigans like auto-pause coming into play.

Speaking of bar mounting, I went all in on the Peak Design case/mount system and I'm really happy with it. There are some quirks (the "out front" bar mount should be available in the opposite handedness, for example) but overall I love having a magnetic mount system again while still being able to do wireless charging.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

i do not get great results from any GPS app with the phone in a pocket or bag. on the bars,

Mission Control: Does it take the speed and distance from the e-bike sensors or from the phone GPS? If the latter, the app is just rubbish (why is it connected to the e-bike in the first place?) Also, 40 minutes longer ride than reported by Wahoo? (Even the TCD-w was about in the agreement with Wahoo within a few minutes!)

What does the 171% average assistance reported by MC actually mean?

BLEvo: Giving you the option to use either e-bike sensors or the phone GPS for speed and distance. Giving Wh provided by the rider and motor, and a detailed Excel file with the history of any imaginable e-biker, HR or ride parameters. No wonder BLEvo was killed by Specialized with the Mastermind. As BLEvo is giving you the real facts about the battery too. Who believes a battery with over 100 charging cycles is 100% healthy? (MC claims so).

 

[Jeremy McCreary]

How best to deal with data stream interruptions (like loss of GPS signal in a tunnel) in a ride recording app? Some interesting coding challenges here.

RideWithGPS seems to do a pretty good job for me overall, but I have no comparison. The auto-pause is seamless and effective.

One recurring interruption the programmers could have gamed out better — me. I used to pause rides manually for longer stops. On occasion, I'd ride off without resuming manually, then catch the error and resume on the next stop. RideWithGPS would fill in the blank with some pretty interesting fictions.

On one such occasion, I got credit for hitting Mach 12 on a slow-going beach ride on soft sand. Not bad for a 500W hub-drive!

Now I let auto-pause handle most stops.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

I used to pause rides manually for longer stops. On occasion, I'd ride off without resuming manually, then catch the error and resume on the next stop.

Manual pausing the ride recording is always a bad idea (unless one has an elephant memory!) Wahoo at least emits a warning beep while in manually paused mode when significant motion is detected.