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Comment by tuchsen | Hacker News Reader

Hey this looks neat, I’ve been thinking on trying something similar. I’ve not encountered the ANT protocol, what bike ya using? Is it a higher level thing that your display is giving you, or something your controller uses? I know Bafang uses CAN protocols in their newer e-bike systems and a lot of manufacturers (especially Chinese) use a proprietary UART protocol to stitch things together on the cheaper end.

The mess of different implementations makes it really hard to hack on and share this kinda stuff.

AI does make it really easy to figure out these protocols now so that’s nice I guess. I just flipped my bike upside down and hooked up a logic analyzer and it took LLM no time to figure it out… it is really impressive

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ANT+ is basically dead because of an EU legal requirement to ensure that personal information is encrypted. So no new devices will be supporting it, and everything has to move to BLE.

It was quite a rich ecosystem of sensor devices, especially for cycling, including speed and cadence sensors, heart rate monitors, power meters, lights, radar, etc.

It has been extremely popular over the last 20 years.

what is insane, is that ble is largely unsecured in modern implementations. when testing, i kept picking up everyones whoops/assorted ble devices spamming out heart rate data to whomever wanted to connect.

You don't need AI to decode these protocols. People have already done that. If you look a bit further than asking you favourite LLM for obvious answers there is plenty of OS code available for the LS, KT and Bafang uart protocols. Still recommend you avoid them, they are pretty poor and CAN is way more reliable.

Ant+ is for connecting sensors and other stuff. Like heart rate monitor, power meter, control resistance on a trainer etc.

ant+ is a garmin protocol that is very common with fitness gadgets and in the bike world. It's a bit like bluetooth, but lower energy usage.

It also got nuked from orbit by European regulators. The ecosystem has a huge installed base but no future.

Isn't it only using standard ble hardware anyway? So what's the problem?

They are both using the same physical layer, but the ANT+ protocol scheme is more amenable to ultra-low-power implementations than BLE is. The European belief that my wheel rotation sensor needs privacy through encryption has effectively outlawed the low-power attributes of ANT+ for future hardware.

I think it’s more about the ANT+ sport heart monitors.

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