Announcing Release 0.9.6: New PM5 interface, new integrations

[JaapvanEkris]

We are proud to announce version 0.9.6!

Many thanks to @Abasz for the great work on the bluetooth implementation, and the many people who participated in beta testing ( especially @fkh-bims, @jryd2000 and @carlito1979 )

This is a major milestone as you can now set up a workout plan via bluetooth and MQTT, and that results can be uploaded to many platforms as well.

New functionality in 0.9.6

• Major upgrade of our PM5 interface, bringing it much closer to the official PM5 interface specification: apps like ErgZone, EXR and many others now work in PM5 mode in most scenarios (see the known limitations section for more info). This allows you to set up a workout in the session manager with ease, have force curves presented and record the data (adresses this request).
• Added RowsAndAll.com and intervals.icu integration for workout reporting (i.e. automatic uploading of a result).
• Added a MQTT peripheral. This reports metrics live to MQTT brokers and control home automation, etc. (see this discussion, this discussion and this request). The MQTT listener you to push workout plans to OpenRowingMonitor from home automation systems (see the integrations page for more information).

Bugfixes and robustness improvements in 0.9.6

• Simplified Strava integration, which now is in line with the rest of the integrations (see this discussion) and greatly simplifying the backend-architecture
• Rewrite of the entire bluetooth stack, greatly improving stability and removing limitations. This also fixes the issue that heartrate device can't be switched dynamically (adresses the known limitation of version 0.9.5, reported in this bug, this feature request and this bug report.
• Fixed a bug in pause behaviour for magnetic rowers causing them to sttop permanently (fixes this bug).
• Fixed a bug in the metrics presentation, which caused some metrics presented/recorded to be averaged too much.
• Fixed a bug in restart behaviour that made the recorders crash (fixes this bug).
• Upgraded ESLint and its configuration, our code is inspected beyond the use of spaces.
• Introducing JSDoc in our code, to make our code easier to understand (see also).
• Upgrade npm packages and node.js: we cleaned house by removing a lot of unneeded npm packages, upgraded npm packages where we could and upgraded to Node.js v22 (current) to increase support. This makes our stack current and fixes some security vulnerabilities.
• We moved from Chromium to Firefox for the webkiosk service as it greatly reduces the CPU load, practically freeing up a complete CPU core.

Known issues in 0.9.6

• Our PM5 interface still has some minor limitations:
  • ErgZone and similar apps also can set a 'Calories' based workout. This interval type is still on our backlog, so it currently isn't supported yet. The PM5 interface will fail silently and will not send an error message on this.
  • ErgData will not work well with our PM5 interface: sometimes it can program OpenRowingMonitor, but you will not be able to save your workout, as we can't create the cryptographic hash to upload the workout results. This also causes a deadlock that hangs communication at both ends (kill the ErgData app to resolve this). As ErgData is propriatary to Concept2, we have decided to not put in any effort to resolve this (see issue 117).
• Some Garmin watches have issues with our 'Cycling Power' and 'Cycling Speed and Cadence' Bluetooth profiles as a result of a change on their side in handling unencrypted Bluetooth commmunication. This affects all current and past versions of OpenRowingMonitor, and might be caused by Garmin (see issue 125).

Upgrade instructions for 0.9.6

Important

When upgrading from an existing install, upgrade using sudo /bin/bash /opt/openrowingmonitor/updateopenrowingmonitor.sh. Please be aware several things have to be done by hand:

• If you use an attached screen, you need to install firefox by sudo apt-get install firefox
• If you use the automated Strava upload, you have to configure your Strava setup in config.js again. Please look at the integrations manual for how to do this.

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This discussion was created from the release Release 0.9.6: New BLE Api, new PM5 emulator, revamped recorders and added uploaders.