AeroPod, PowerPod and Newton

I started a training ride a couple of days ago without noticing that my mechanic has forgotten to reinstall my cadence magnet after working on my cranks. Since I was riding a PT wheel, I thought "No big deal. I'll just do without cadence data on this ride and rely on the PT power numbers."

I was getting reasonable power numbers, which I assumed were being delivered by the PT wheel since my iAero was seeing zero cadence and would have forced power to zero as well. During the ride, I did notice that my average power was off (in the single digits) as was my kJ total. I blew it off assuming that those calculations were tied to the iAero power, not the DFPM.

However, when I downloaded the ride file, I was surprised to see that three is no DFPM data in the file.

Can anyone explain how I could see reasonable power numbers during the ride, but not find those same numbers in the ride file? Is there any was to recover the DFPM data in this case?

Granted, this is an unusual setup: iAero, Garmin sensor and speed magnet but no cadence magnet, PT Wheel. In the 2+ years I've been using the iBike I've never hit this situation.

With the new firmware if you forget your cadence sensor the iBike will search for it. When it doesn't find the cadence sensor, it will turn off looking for that and operate based solely on the speed sensor. . .meaning that you still will see good wattage data.

If you open the csv file in excel, can you see any power in the DFPM column? I'm not sure why the power tap data wouldn't record, but if the data wasn't being sent to the iBike head unit then there is no way for it to record.

Unless you also recorded the ride with the little yellow head unit, then we can import that file into the iBike csv file.
But it's good to know that when the power tap didn't record, you had a backup unit. . .that is giving you accurate wattage!

Ah, so that's what happened. I didn't realize that the new firmware now calculates power without the cadence sensor -- good to know.

No, there's not DFPM data in the .csv file, so I guess the PT wasn't recording for some reason. The bad thing for me is that I was riding with a bad profile. I was on my TT bike with training wheels on the bull horns, while my profile was set in full aero gear on the aero bars. Oh well, I should know better.

Thanks for the insight Boyd!

In the software you can switch the profile after the ride. I know it won't make it so you had accurate watts on the screen during your ride, but at least for logging and training diary purposes, you will have accurate information.