Smoothing

I started the beta a few days ago. I had a hand injury and can’t effectively ride on the road so I looked for ways to make the trainer more enjoyable. So far I’ve liked what I’ve seen and hope for more advanced features and configuration options down the road.

The only feedback that I’ve got so far is smoothing. I’ve seen another old post that mentions smoothing of values. Watts and W/Kg are very jumpy. There is a lot of jitter that could be reduced with a bit more smoothing. I will be pedaling along at a very steady cadence in a specific gear and the fluctuation of W/Kg jumps all around. It’d be nice to see it more steady.

I work as a test engineer and we see the effects of jitter on a daily basis. Most of our industrial sensing equipment has built in smoothing; however, we sometimes use raw data and configure our own running averages. With our coding, we can even shorten the running average if we see a major difference and then expand the smoothing if the measurements stay at the new higher or lower level.

An example would be, you’re pedaling along at 2.5 W/Kg. and smoothing is running at a 3 second moving average. You hit a sprint point and stand on the pedals. Your power increases accordingly and your W/Kg reading becomes 3.6. When the software senses the increased power output, it drops to a 1 second running average and after 3 seconds at the new level continues on at a 3 second running average.

Smoothing is pretty standard for power meters. On my Garmin I have it set as a 3 second average - which seems to be the standard most people do. And trainer road I have the same setting, which also works pretty well. 

Obviously Zwift needs to take the raw power to calculate your speed but there’s no reason why they can’t display a smoothed average - it’s especially important for structured training as it’s impossible to hold a specific wattage with raw power data - it’s far too variable.

+1  Smoothing needs to be implemented

Agree.  Looks like this is pretty old, but the feature related to training programs that require cadence are basically broken.  This is more of a bug than feature request.