I refuse to buy a cycling “computer”. I already bike with my smartphone connected to my bike with a Quad Lock. I also wear my sports watch, which both more compute/memory power than any Edge “computer”. As I’m biking, I just want my stats on one of my existing devices. In particular I’m usually focused on my distance, speed, and cadence. Pretty much everything else is “nice to know”, but not a big deal for me.
I recently purchased the Garmin Speed and Cadence Sensor 2 bundle. There’s a simple cadence sensor and the speed sensor supposedly helps when GPS is unavailable. Honestly I installed the speed sensor “just because”, but I think it would have been better to only get the cadence sensor alone (which is an option to buy standalone). My reasoning is that I don’t mountain bike in the wilderness where cellular is not available.
Make sure you buy the “version 2” – that’s critical as this is the only sensor that supports both ANT+ and Bluetooth, and allows concurrent devices to be connected.
Regardless of which option you buy, the cadence sensor 2 is easy to install and setup. Just follow the instructions to wrap the bands around your crank arm, push the pedal a few revolutions and pair it to your smartwatch (e.g. via ANT+) and/or device (e.g. smartphone via bluetooth).
If you go on a ride, you can save your ride information and you will see the cadence data show up in the results.
What’s not obvious is how can you get this data streamed to your Garmin watch or smartphone directly. If you start the Bike activity on a Garmin watch, you get set of screens showing: distance, time, speed, lap information, and intensity zone. That’s the default.
After you’ve paired your cadence sensor, however, you have access to the data. The issue is showing that data. For this you want to go into your Garmin watch menu. On a Fenix device, the sequence would be:
Press and hold the middle left button, scroll down to Settings, Activities and Apps, then Bike, Bike Settings, and then Data Screens. That was quite a path and not so easy, but it is fairly intuitive.
Once you’re in Data Screens, you can choose the pencil icon to “Edit” the screen, choose a layout that works for you and then under one of the Fields for that layout, you can choose either “Cadence” or “Avg. Cadence” for either real time cadence or the average for your ride. Once you save the Data Screen it will always be there for your future bike rides.
On your smartphone, it’s a little odd that the Garmin Connect app will not support real time activity stats from your watch or sensors. Only after you’ve completed an activity will it upload the data to Garmin Connect.
So here you need to go outside the Garmin solution set. Some 3rd party applications like Strava used to support sensor data in your activities. Not anymore 🙁
I could only find one app that does support real time Garmin sensor data visualization on your smartphone, and that app is Cyclemeter, which is available on Android and iOS.
This app has real power and customization. Out of the box, you first need to make sure you’ve done bluetooth pairing to the each of the speed and cadence sensors. Remember, the sensors only “turn on” if they’re moving on the bike, so spin the tire and the crank arm. You can do it “while riding”, but for safety reasons I don’t recommend it.
Once the sensors are paired, you should see them in your list of paired bluetooth devices (screenshot from Android, trailing digits masked for security reasons).
Now that the smartphone can connect to the sensors, we can setup Cyclemeter to grab the data and show your real time stats. First, you will need the Pro version of Cyclemeter as the free version does not allow connecting to devices. At the time of this writing, it’s $9.99/year. With the app installed, you should first go in and enter your bike information, most importantly, you need to enter the wheel diameter. In my case, I entered 691mm for my wheel diameter.
You can now go in and setup the sensors in Cyclemeter. Start by going to the settings icon and scroll down to the “Devices” option. Click the “+” sign to add a new devices and go through the process of adding each of the cadence and speed sensors. Note that the devices must be on and connected while doing this, so remember, spin the wheel and crank arm. When you’re done, your Devices screen should look like the below screenshot.
Ok, we’re almost done. Now the final challenge is seeing the sensor data. The only screen that by default shows sensor data has it presented in the worst possible format to view while biking.
This is definitely not useful while biking. So, you have two options. First, Cyclemeter has an entire dashboard specifically for cadence data. You could just add that dashboard to your list to scroll through. You can do this by going to the Settings gear icon, choose “Stopwatch pages”, then choose the “+” sign to add a new page and choose the “Cycle Cadence and Graph” page.
In my opinion, a better option is to just add cadence data to an existing dashboard you already find useful. To do this, go into an existing Stopwatch page by selecting the Settings gear icon, choose Stopwatch pages, then pick the page you want to modify. In my case, I’d like to modify the “Main Overview” page. Here I can choose “Statistics” and swap out one of the statistics for “Cycle Cadence” as my choice.
Now if I go back to the Main Overview page, I can see my cycle cadence data in real time as I’m biking. Note there was also an option for the Avg. Cadence as well. You can also create your own custom page with all the statistics you want in it.
And there you have it. You can now bike with access to your speed and cadence sensor data in real time, visible. This solutions allows you to view that data both on your Garmin GPS watch and on your smartphone. I wish this were easier – if you find a better solution, please let me know.
