Veloce: GPS for e-bikes & MTB

Alessandro Cinquini

About this app

Veloce talks Bluetooth to your ebike's control unit and hands you what the display will not tell you. Read-only: it writes nothing to the bike.

THE PROTOCOLS: NO OTHER APP LETS YOU CONNECT ALL THESE BIKES
• TQ HPR40 / HPR50 / HPR60 — full support: real battery percentage instead of bars, motor power and your own power kept apart, assist level, cadence, motor temperature, odometer, battery cycles and health, frame number and component firmware versions.
• Specialized SL 1.1 — telemetry from the motor's own service.
• Bosch — beta.
• Standard BLE sensors: power, speed and cadence, heart rate strap.

WITH NO MOTOR IT ALL WORKS, PLUS A FEW NUMBERS MORE
This is not a cut-down version for muscle bikes: it is the very same app, and it computes data other apps do not give you.
• Watts estimated from physics: gradient, wind taken from the weather, speed through the air, total mass, rolling and aerodynamic drag. No power meter needed.
• Real gradient: from the barometer where there is one, otherwise from the digital terrain model with geoid correction. Not the difference between two GPS altitudes, which on a single point wanders by metres.
• Barometric ascent anchored to GPS, so weather drift does not eat it.
• Speed, distance, pace, elevation, and heart rate from a BLE strap.

TWO WAYS TO PLAY IT
THE GHOST. Load a route that has timestamps and chase yourself: on the map you see where the you of that day would be right now, and the chip tells you if you are ahead or behind, in metres and in seconds. It works on rides you have already saved: your opponent is you, three months ago.
DUNGEON RIDE. The world map starts covered in fog and uncovers as you ride, forever. Every climb is a boss, and the force you hit with is your real watts: on an ebike only your legs count, the motor does not fight for you. Your heart rate is the health bar and refills by finding food on the map. 28 achievements across four rarity tiers. No in-app purchases, no loot picked up standing still.
If you only want the numbers, one tap turns it off and you never see it again.

YOUR DATA IS YOURS, FULL STOP
• Your ride history lives on your phone. No account is needed to use the app.
• Backup goes to YOUR own cloud: your Google Drive, your folder. Not to a server of ours, because there is no server of ours.
• Only what you decide goes to Strava, at the end of a ride, when you press the button. No automatic upload, and the activity is yours.
• Standard GPX export: what is yours, you can take away whenever you like.

And the rest you expect from a bike computer: offline maps you can download anywhere in the world, a map that turns with your direction of travel, GPX routes with direction arrows and estimated arrival, voice announcements every 5 km, your ride on the lock screen.

Veloce is written by someone who rides it on Sundays. If a number is missing, write to us: it lands in the next build.

What’s new

The climb, by name. Even with no route loaded Veloce recognises the climb you are on: it draws it the way the road really runs, and tells you how far the top is and how much climbing is left.

Category and gradient colours in the scale cyclists already know, with the average gradient waiting for you to the top.