The Hurt Box Indoor power trainer software preview

Want to measure power accurately from your home trainer without using an expensive power meter?

The guys down at the HurtBox have been working on the THB-Ergo software for months now. We had a version up and running at this year's Feb Bright Boot Camp but there has been a lot of development and enhancement done on it since then. We have been running it in our cycle studio for our altitude training and ergo sessions for several months with great success. We have also just started using it at our indoor training classes down at BikePark too!

It allows you to use your existing ANT+ sensor (we use the Garmin Speed/Cadence Sensor and Garmin heart rate monitor strap) with approved home trainers such as the Kurt Kinetic to provide a real time display of your Speed, Heart Rate, Normalised Power, 30 Second Average Power and Lap Power, Cadence and TTS number (see picture above). Plus it has a workout timer with lap time.

To get power it uses the manufacturer's Speed / Power curve and calculates it on the fly. In addition, The HurtBox Company can provide a calibration service to accurately calibrate your home trainer for use with the THB-Ergo software. By using an accurate PowerTap hub they are able to mathematically map your trainer's individual resistance profile. This mapping is much more precise than the one-size-fits-all mapping provided by the manufacturer. We have been using this calibration on our trainers and getting an accuracy to within 3 watts of our Powertap values. This is more than accurate enough to do indoor trainer sessions to power.

The software records FIT files and has a calendar view as well so that you can go into an exercise then drill down into the data with the graph view.

It also has a quadrant view that is updated on the fly while riding.

• Kurt Kinetic Road Machine
• Kurt Kinetic Rock'n'roll
• Kurt Kinetic Standard Fluid
• Kurt Kinetic Cyclone
• Kurt Kinetic AC Pro
• BlackBurn Fluid
• Cycleops Fluid 2
• Elite Fluid Alu
• Elite Volare

It’s expected to be released sometime in October 2011 so not that far away.