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2023-02-18
A ride in the Crankbank is just a collection of the following data: start date and time, moving time, total time, distance, elevation gain, elevation loss, and bike name. Optionally it can also include one or more text tags, a title, and a description.
If there was only one way to add rides to the Crankbank I would probably wouldn't add very many rides to it. A method that works well for recording a routine commute may not work well for recording a mountain bike ride. Sometimes I have a GPS bike computer with me, other times I don't. If there is not a sufficiently quick method that I can do on the go I might forget about a ride before I have the chance to log it. To accommodate different circumstances I need different methods for entering rides.
The manual entry is the simplest method, but can be time consuming. A series of prompts asks you for key information about the ride including start time, distance, elevation gain, elapsed time, which bike you rode, tags, etc.
At present the interface is very minimal and doesn't give the user a lot of help. I would like it to one day provide suggestions for bike names and tags.
On routes that I travel frequently, like riding to work and back I would like to have a few details like distance, elevation, and even time to be auto-populated by the system. To this end there is a concept of predefined rides. If I ride to work I go to the predefined rides menu, select the "to work" predefined ride, which contains distance, elevation, and time data, and the Crankbank prompts me for the rest of the data about the ride such as which bike I rode. I then have the opportunity to change the predefined values. This way I don't have to remember the distance or elevation changes for my usual commute route.
Predefined rides are stored in JSON files, which currently have to be created manually.
Making a note is for when you do not have time to enter all the details of a ride, but you want to record just a few details now, and you'll come back and complete the entry later. Notes are totally free-form and the Crankbank does not parse or interpret them. Some time after making the note you can revisit it. At that time the Crankbank will show you the note and prompt you for full ride details. You can even make a note on a different device and copy it to the notes folder on the machine that houses the Crankbank using scp or a similar thing.
When adding a ride from a GPS track a lot of the necesary data can be extracted from the file. Start time, distance, moving time, elapsed time, elevation gain can all be calulated. (Each of these calculations has some interesting fine details. That's why so often Strava and Garmin, for example, will report different lengths or elevation changes for the same ride.) The user just has to enter what bike they rode, and tags and descriptions if they like. The workflow with GPS tracks is a lot like it is with notes. You upload the GPS track to the machine that houses the crankbank, and later you enter any details about the ride that can not be automatically extracted from the GPS file.
When parsing a GPS track I also intend to store an elevation profile of the ride for display in the UI. One day elevation profiles could be added to predefined rides too.
Right now very little of the GPS track parsing code is done. GPX is the only format I'm targeting right now, but ultimately I would like the Crankbank to support FIT files as well.