While the Wahoo Kickr v6 works with Zwift virtual shifting most of the time, it occasionally fails during a ride. As a guess, it probably fails one out of every ten rides. When this happens, the gear updates in the Zwift application reflect the virtual shifting status, but the trainer does not respond. The trainer is stuck in the same virtual gear. The only way to recover from this is to power-cycle the Kickr unit and reconnect to Zwift.
I’m wondering if virtual shifting drops out during the trainer auto-calibration, but that’s just a wild guess.
When this happens during a ride, my fix is usually the following…
Activate coffee mode
Power cycle the Wahoo Kickr v6 unit
Wait about a minute for the Kickr to power up
Deactivate coffee mode since trainers can’t be paired to Zwift with coffee active
Quickly pair the trainer to Zwift
Pedal like crazy to catch up with the group.
If the coffee option isn’t available then the next approach is to end the ride, power-cycle the trainer, and late rejoin if possible.
It’s worth noting I also have a Wahoo Kickr Core unit and have never experienced this issue. Virtual shifting works flawless with the Kickr Core. It’s only the Kickr V6 that occasionally drops the virtual shifting during a ride.
I have the following firmware/software versions installed
Kickr v6 firmware 5.3.5 with Direct Connect and 10 Hz Race Mode enabled
Zwift Play firmware 1.3.1 - hardware version B.0
Zwift PC application - 1.69
Anyone else experience this problem and know of a fix? Right now virtual shifting with the Wahoo Kickr v6 isn’t reliable.
Are you using the Direct Connect over WiFi, or are do you have an Ethernet cable hard wired directly to your laptop?
I would recommend you try running the Ethernet cable method (how to on Wahoo’s support site) to eliminate router issues as the culprit.
If everything works perfectly hard-wired, start looking at issues with the router. One of those is that your laptop and your WDC connection over WiFi must both be on the router’s 2.4Ghz subnet.
Many routers will automatically assign 5Ghz-capable devices like laptops to that channel, and that may cause issues like what you’re describing. See this other Wahoo support page for details.
I’m currently using the Wahoo Direct Connect dongle with Ethernet hard wired to a Netgear Gigabit Ethernet switch. The desktop computer running Zwift is connected to the same switch and the OS is Windows 10. The Ethernet switch uplink is hard wired to the WiFi router with Ethernet. The only device on WiFi is an Android phone running the Zwift Companion App.
If you think it would be beneficial to try, I could install a second Ethernet LAN card in the desktop computer and hard wire the Wahoo Direct Connect adapter directly to the desktop, thus bypassing the Ethernet switch.
Thanks for the link. I’ll review the Ethernet cable method documented on Wahoo’s support site and see what they recommend.
Yeah, I can try that, but am not sure how to reproduce the issue to test it. I use the faveros via ant+ because I had some Bluetooth power dropouts with them
This is why I am suggesting to focus on Bluetooth, because you must have reliable Bluetooth for virtual shifting to work. It’s often necessary to put a Bluetooth dongle on a 2m extension cable to get decent performance (or if it’s a PCIe adapter, have the antenna on an extension cable). The fact that the Assiomas are unreliable with Bluetooth is a clue that it’s not working well enough to have reliable virtual shifting either.
This video is a good guide to getting reliable Bluetooth performance. If you have a system with built-in Bluetooth that doesn’t work well, this is especially relevant.
