Well, this is disheartening, and somewhat encouraging at the same time ..
I thought I had resolved my issues by replacing my TICKR. The last two rides over the weekend worked flawlessly.
However, today has been a completely different experience.
I had two rides today (commutes). The bike had a Gen2 Stages for power and cadence and and an RPM Speed for wheel speed. I was also wearing a the new TICKR. All of the batteries were full/green (registering 3.0v on a coin cell battery checker - one of the best $6 I ever spent
). Everything is on the latest firmware available as of the last check I made (Saturday - see below).
On the ride in this morning, the TICKR dropped out on two different occasions. Both times I was able to get it to reconnect by 'forgetting' the sensor and re-pairing (sadly, I'm getting good at doing this riding down the MUT). The stages seemed to work as well. The speed sensor, I'm not 100% sure about. Since the head unit registers speed by the GPS as well. As I'm riding, I don't have any way of knowing if the speed it's displaying is from the GPS or from the Wheel Speed Sensor. Today however, I happened to look down and noticed my speed at 0 MPH. The problem is, I was probably going about 16MPH. It obviously wasn't getting this speed reading from the GPS, as I have auto-pause enabled. If the GPS were not registering movement the unit would have paused. My assumption is that the wheel speed sensor was either disconnected, or just not transmitting data to the unit. The speed reading came back after a few seconds, although again, I have no way of knowing if the speed being displayed is GPS based or sensor based.
The ride home was even worse. When I powered the unit up, all of the sensors connected except the Stages. I puttered around the office parking lot for about 10 minutes to see if it would come to life, but no joy. The Stages App worked fine, so I know it's not the PM. I did the forget/re-pair thing the Stages and even though it re-paired immediately, it still showed no data. After deleting and re-pairing again, I decided to rename the sensor on the phone app, and after doing that it immediately started displaying data and worked fine for the rest of the ride.
Now, the wheel speed sensor is another story. About 5 miles into my ride, I noticed the 0 MPH thing again. I waited a minute, expecting it to reconnect on it's own like before. And it did.. however, apparently, something was wonky. The speed on the unit was displaying 225 MPH (wooo! finally an error in my favor!!). Anyway, I did the 'forget/re-pair' thing, and it started working normally, except the occasional 0 MPH thing, which seemed to resolve on it's own (again, I'm assuming - i could have been reverting to GPS speed).
When I got home and ended the ride, the speed and distance data were way off (way too high). The commute is just over 16 miles, and I usually average between 15 and 16 MPH for this ride. Today, the distance registered as 23.6 miles, with an average speed of 22.6 and a max speed of 224.6 MPH.
I haven't uploaded this to Strava yet. I have a dummy strava account I'm going to upload it to to check it out before I post it to my real account. I don't want to get flagged for going 225mph down the 520 trail (30mph is fast enough on that downhill).
Here is the kicker. When I got home, I started typing out an email update to the support rep I've been working with, when I decided I'd double check to make sure there wasn't a firmware update that might deal with these odd behaviors.
Sure enough, they posted ELEMNT Firmware WF38-435 some time yesterday afternoon, and also updated the iPhone App (I use android, so this didn't affect me). I also opened up the Wahoo Utility app and checked for sensor firmware, and sure enough, there was a firmware update for my RPM Speed sensor as well.
ELEMNT Software Updates ? Wahoo Fitness Support
I have updated everything as of 10 minutes ago, but of course I have no idea if this will help with this odd sensor behavior I've been experiencing. I surely hope so, as it's starting to get frustrating. I *really* want this thing to work so I can permanently retire my Garmin (i.e. smash it into a brick wall as hard as I can, over and over and over).
Sadly, I won't be riding for a couple of days (schedule rest), so it might be the weekend before I have another test.
Edit: When I uploaded the ride to Strava, I fully expected it to give me some data errors, but apparently Strava cleaned up/normalized the speed spikes, as the ride data in Strava looks fairly normal.