Wahoo announces GoPro connectivty, Smart Lights integration, and Music Control

Wahoo has announced three new connectivity related items for their BOLT V2 & ROAM V2 bike computers. As the title implies, you’ll now be able to control your GoPro, control your existing ANT+ smart lights (from any vendor), and control the music on your phone.

Note that while the other pieces are here today, the GoPro integration isn’t lit up yet. Wahoo doesn’t quite yet have a timeframe for it, as it’s been delayed slightly to work out some kinks. Nonetheless, I’ll give you a quick 2-second tour.

The smart light control and music control pieces are live as of today, whereas the GoPro integration isn’t quite live yet.

Bike Light Control:

First up, is the lighting control. This leverages ANT+ connectivity to let you connect to any ANT+ lights. These can be from Garmin, Trek, Bontrager, See.Sense, Cycliq, Cannondale, and many others over the years. Note that they *must* be ANT+ enabled lights, not just general smart lights. For example, Lezyne has some smart/wireless lights that use their own protocols, but they didn’t adopt the existing ANT+ standard.

In any event, you’ll go into the pairing menu to pair up each light individually. Ensure that you do power it on first of course, and then they should show up. Here, I did the rear light first:

Once paired, it’ll take a couple of seconds to appear in the sensors list (at the top), and then you’ll see a new control panel (per sensor/light) that lets you control the state of the light (brightness level/flashing/etc…), as well as see the battery status:

I then went and paired up the front light, and got the same control panel:

Finally, there’s a new option in the Wahoo ELEMNT app, that you can toggle on to automatically turn on/off the lights when your ride starts/stops (the recording of the ride). Note that this implementation is a bit different than Garmin’s in that there’s no ‘light network’ formed. Each light is basically controlled individually, rather than an entire cohesive group. In most scenarios, that probably doesn’t matter too much if you’re using the automatic on/off option anyway. But, figured I’d point out that difference.

GoPro Integration:

Next, there’s the upcoming GoPro integration. This allows you to control your GoPro camera with the Wahoo BOLT V2 & ROAM V2, switching between modes, and starting/stopping recording.

To begin, you’ll be pairing your GoPro much like any other sensor on the Wahoo unit. Starting on the GoPro side, you’ll go into the Bluetooth pairing menu, akin to how you’d pair a GoPro app or remote. Then, over on the BOLT or ROAM, you’ll go to add a sensor (just like you’d add a power meter or heart rate sensor). Here, you’ll see the GoPro listed:

Simply tap Save, and you’re done.

How it enumerates in that list seems to vary slightly though with each time I did it:

Next, it’ll automatically add a GoPro control page to your list of pages. This page lets you switch between the different GoPro ‘presets’ that you have, switch between photo/video/timelapse, and finally and most important: start/stop recording. It’ll also show battery status of the GoPro, as well as the SD card storage remaining (albeit in beta, slightly mixed up hours/mins/seconds). Guess I don’t need that 512GB card I bought yesterday after all! 🙂

You’ll see the exact config profiles listed on the screen (e.g., 5.3K/50FPS/SuperView), though the custom names you’ve given (e.g. ‘Epic’ in my case), aren’t pulled over.

You can press up/down to iterate between the different video modes, and then press the ‘Mode’ button to iterate between the Video/Photo/Timelapse options. It takes roughly 1 second for it to make the changes, or start recording. Once you start a recording, it’ll also show the recording time at the top.

Now, as noted, the feature isn’t yet available today – there seems to be a few quirks on it. It’s unclear to me if they’re using a private API, or the semi-public GoPro API for this. Other companies, like COROS, have used the public API in the past, and honestly, they are often very finicky, namely around how the camera re-connects after you turn it on (or turn the bike computer on). Which usually requires re-pairing each time.

I did though test out dual-control from both from app and bike computer at the same time, and it happily accepted commands from both, and kept sync across all three devices:

In any case, more testing once it’s ready/released.

Music Control:

Last but not least (ok, it’s least), it’s music control. This lets you control any ‘music’ on your phone, from the ELEMNT. Albeit, it’s more than just music. It’s really anything that comes via the phone’s standard music controls. That can be podcasts, YouTube, etc… As long as the standard phone music player is playing it, you can control it.

This includes Volume, Pause/Resume, Skip Forward/Back, and then the app name playing (e.g. Spotify), as well as the name of the track/song/etc and the artist. This feature will automatically show up if you’ve got something playing on your phone, and shows like below for the FIT File Podcast:

Or, like such for music:

Response times seem to be sub-second, in terms of how quickly it changes things. Note that, somewhat disappointingly, they didn’t put any album covers in that giant empty white space on the unit. Would have been a nice touch.

With that – thanks for reading!

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