Golden Cheetah: PowerTap Software for Linux and Mac OS X

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Golden Cheetah
PowerTap Software for Linux and Mac OS X

Contributors

Sean Rhea bought a PowerTap Pro on April 20, 2006, and immediately set to figuring out how to use it from his Mac Powerbook without using Virtual PC. Within a week, he was able to download the raw data. Shortly thereafter, Russ Cox asked what he was up to, and the two worked together to figure out the packing format used. By May 4, they could reproduce the numbers given by the PowerTap software except for minor discrepancies in the time values. David Easter then pointed out how the checksum bytes in the download protocol were used, and Sean Rhea coded up their combined discoveries into the two utilities, ptdl and ptunpk.

Later that year, Sean needed to learn QT for his real job, and he set about writing a graphical version of ptdl and ptunpk for practice. He released the first graphical version on September 6, 2006, changing the name to GoldenCheetah in reference to an old legend from his days as a runner.

Since then, a number of others have helped out in various ways. Rob Carlsen helped get the serial port version of the PowerTap Pro working with the Keyspan USB-to-serial adaptor. Rob also figured out how to build universal binaries for Mac OS X. Scott Overfield helped figure out that we should be using the /dev/cu.* devices instead of the /dev/tty.* ones. Aldy Hernandez and Andrew Kruse helped get things working under Linux. Dan Connelly helped find and fix several core dumps. Justin Knotzke contributed code to import comma-separated value files and visually mark intervals on the ride plot. J.T. Conklin added the ability to import TCX files. J.T. also added a pedal force vs. pedal velocity chart.

Last modified 2006/09/06 04:07:18.