I am looking to order the Zwift Ride with KICKR CORE, I already have KICKR Headwind Bluetooth Fan and the Wahoo HRM as well, I am wondering can and how will everything pair up ?
Is there enough channels available for all to pair ?
I am also wondering does anyone know when the Zwift Ride with KICKR CORE will come with the Cog V2 as Im going to wait on this.
The Headwind should be no issue, it pairs to the Kickr Core or your HRM if you want it to adjust for speed or heartrate respectively. The AppleTV and Zwift don’t need to know about it.
Hi @James_Duane and welcome to forums! This is Alejandro from Zwift. Great to know you are interested in making Zwift part of your indoor cycling routine. Regarding the connection structure @Paul_Southworth is right, you can use the Zwift Companion app to pair the devices to Zwift.
In regards to the date we will be releasing the Zwift Ride with KICKR CORE with the Zwift Cog V2, there is no date yet, however, take a look at our website Zwift.com since we will be notifying our Zwifters once we release this version.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to support@zwift.com if you need any assistance.
Say Mark, I’ve just got set up with the Zwift Ride and I’m loving it. However, I do notice that my Headwind fan does not speed up and slow down with my Zwift speed, but rather seems to track with how fast the KikrCore is spinning. Since I’m using virtual shifting of course (Zwift Ride), the KikrCore speed is always directly proportional to my cadence, which I keep fairly constant between 80-90 rpm, irrespective of speed (as one would with real gears). Unfortunately, this means even when I’m in a “low gear” (virtual) slowly climbing a hill, the KikrCore is still spinning according to my cadence, and consequently the Headwind is still blowing as if I’m going much faster. Is there any way to get the Headwind to work with the Zwift speed?
I’m still on a now old Kicker v5, so can’t test the effect of using virtual shifting. And I have my headwind working of heartrate. But I’ll try it linked to speed tomorrow and see if it has the same behaviour with non-virtual gearing.
I suspect with non-virtual gearing you’ll be fine because the speed of the Kicker spinning will be directly proportional to your bike speed. It’s the virtual gearing that messes things up.
I just did a quick 10 minutes of fiddling and it may not be you or Zwift (or me). Just using my tablet and the Wahoo app, I could set the Headwind to speed mode and it didn’t blow at all - but worked fine and was controllable in the manual and heartrate modes. So wasn’t surprised when much the same happened when running Zwift on my tablet.
I’ll google around but to me it looks like speed mode is broken in Wahoo.
Nope, no blow at all. After pressing spd, the spd lamp was flashing and once I started spinning the Kickr the lamp went solid - which all suggests its correctly paired to the Kickr as its speed sensor. And in the Wahoo app I can see its settings and control which mode it is in from there.
Okay, got it working in speed mode. Restarted everything (power off/power on), pressed spd and then pressed the power button for 3-seconds before then spinning the Kickr. So essentially, redid the pairing even though it had been indicating it was paired (but it probably hadn’t been used in speed mode since the I first installed and played with it a couple of years ago).
And the result - it doesn’t care whether I’m spinning like crazy in a low gear or pushing in a high gear - it’s adjusting to my speed. And again that was whilst using the Wahoo app or on a route in the Zwift app.
So did a full ride today rather that just basic test turning of pedals I did yesterday.
Turning everything back on, the Headwind remembered the speed pairing with the Kickr v5. So I did a 22k ride and I did spot one big issue. The Headwind is paired to the Kickr speed, which when riding on the flat or up a hill reasonably matches your speed in Zwift. However, when you start rolling downhill, Zwift knows about that and factors it into your Zwift virtual speed, but the Kickr doesn’t and so the Headwind doesn’t.
Taken to the extreme, on a long freewheel downhill, as the Kickr flywheel slows down so does the Headwind even though Zwift had me at 50kph plus.
Unfortunately, we need a mechanism for Zwift to share its virtual speed so that you can pair the Headwind directly to your tablet or computer as the speed sensor. And I’m not aware of anything to do that.
Meanwhile, even when its working well, the accurate mimicking of low airflow as I slogged up the hill was too accurate to real life. With both issues (working accurately uphill and badly downhill) I’m off back to heartrate pairing which is at least accurate to the degree of cooling my body wants.
Yeah so this is the same problem I have - the Kickr Headwind does not seem to communicate with Zwift at all, but spins up and down as the Kickr core flywheel does. The problem is even more exacerbated when you have virtual gears because then you have a fixed physical gearing between your pedals and the Kickr core. I can be crawling along at a snail’s pace up a steep hill but as long as I’m pedaling quickly (low virtual gear), the Kickr core is spinning fast and the Headwind thinks I’m motoring along at speed and blasts away… I’ve written to Wahoo to see if there’s a fix for this.