Hey this looks neat, I’ve been thinking on trying something similar. I’ve not encountered the ANT protocol, what bike ya using? Is it a higher level thing that your display is giving you, or something your controller uses? I know Bafang uses CAN protocols in their newer e-bike systems and a lot of manufacturers (especially Chinese) use a proprietary UART protocol to stitch things together on the cheaper end.

The mess of different implementations makes it really hard to hack on and share this kinda stuff.

AI does make it really easy to figure out these protocols now so that’s nice I guess. I just flipped my bike upside down and hooked up a logic analyzer and it took LLM no time to figure it out… it is really impressive

ANT+ is basically dead because of an EU legal requirement to ensure that personal information is encrypted. So no new devices will be supporting it, and everything has to move to BLE.

It was quite a rich ecosystem of sensor devices, especially for cycling, including speed and cadence sensors, heart rate monitors, power meters, lights, radar, etc.

It has been extremely popular over the last 20 years.

what is insane, is that ble is largely unsecured in modern implementations. when testing, i kept picking up everyones whoops/assorted ble devices spamming out heart rate data to whomever wanted to connect.

You don't need AI to decode these protocols. People have already done that. If you look a bit further than asking you favourite LLM for obvious answers there is plenty of OS code available for the LS, KT and Bafang uart protocols. Still recommend you avoid them, they are pretty poor and CAN is way more reliable.

Ant+ is for connecting sensors and other stuff. Like heart rate monitor, power meter, control resistance on a trainer etc.

ant+ is a garmin protocol that is very common with fitness gadgets and in the bike world. It's a bit like bluetooth, but lower energy usage.

It also got nuked from orbit by European regulators. The ecosystem has a huge installed base but no future.

Isn't it only using standard ble hardware anyway? So what's the problem?

They are both using the same physical layer, but the ANT+ protocol scheme is more amenable to ultra-low-power implementations than BLE is. The European belief that my wheel rotation sensor needs privacy through encryption has effectively outlawed the low-power attributes of ANT+ for future hardware.

I think it’s more about the ANT+ sport heart monitors.

Can you cite a source for that one? Of the 25 fatalities in sf in 2025 all but two were someone driving a car, truck, or van.

Of the two others, one was a scooter operator striking and elderly person, and then the other was an elderly person on a mobility device swerving out of the way of pedestrians crossing against the light. Zero bus accidents involving pedestrian fatalities.

I believe that their was one bus fatality this year, but of 12 total, I haven't looked up the causes of those accidents yet but I'd guess that the majority of them are going to be caused by drivers as well.

I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.

I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).

So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.

Ah nice demo! I flew around SF for way too long just enjoying the sights. On my M3 Air using Chrome it eventually just turns into blobs and my character get stuck, takes about twenty minutes. I popped open the DevTools and the game loads in at like 400mb but after five or so minutes I'm at 2GB of memory consumption. I'd guess that you need to have your agent do a couple of passes for memory leaks. Very fun otherwise!