LiteRide - A free, no signup, web, lightweight virtual cycling simulator

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literide

Hi friends,

I know there has been an influx of cycling apps being posted, and I am sure a lot of you are sick of seeing these posts, but I genuinely think LiteRide (https://literide.cyclingintervals.com/) will be beneficial to the community.

Zwift pricing hurts. It is great if you are into racing, events and riding with your friends, but for someone like me, I wasn’t using those features. I was selecting a course, or a workout, and riding.

I built LiteRide with five goals in mind

  1. No signup or no downloading. Zwift, MyWhoosh (the worst), take so much time to load each time you want to ride. For someone doing 30 minute weekday rides, this was very frustrating.
  2. Free.
  3. Climbs, gradients, and something to look at.
  4. Minimal battery drain / GPU and RAM usage. Mostly because I have an inefficient laptop, but Zwift and MyWhoosh would drain my battery in an hour.
  5. No lost files. I have experimented with a few different free apps, and something that has happened to me time and time again is the app crashing, or I lose internet, and my .fit file is gone.

So that is what LiteRide is. A free site that instantly loads, with minimal GPU and RAM usage, that allows you to execute workouts and ride courses, while looking at some… objects passing you by :sweat_smile: . You can happily lose internet connection, because all of the data is loaded when you first start, and there’s no server to communicate with. It is essentially offline.

This isn’t a replacement for Zwift or MyWhoosh. It doesn’t come with multiplayer, leaderboards, events, or even great graphics. If you want something like that, I would recommend looking into BikeTerra or Ride Cave.

This isn’t a coaching app either, although if you don’t want to upload your own workout, you can browse through a catalog of workouts. If you are more interested in the workouts, feel free to check out https://cyclingintervals.com/

If you only care about executing workouts, Auuki is a great option. This is what I was using before I built this, but I found it a bit too limiting.

Lastly, before you try it, here are some limitations you should be aware of

  1. You can’t use ANT+ in the browser, only BLE (Bluetooth), and it only supports Chromium browsers. This is a web limitation, there is nothing I can do about it. This is why most cycling trainer apps are downloaded (which would defeat my goal).
  2. Automatic Strava upload has a limit of 10 users, which has likely been hit already. Again, nothing I can do until I get extended access to Strava API, which may take a while. You can still download the .fit and manually upload it.
  3. The .fit files are deleted after 7 days. This one I can control but don’t want to run out of memory on your browser.

Thanks for reading

(If you have any feedback, course suggestions, or workout suggestions, let me know!)

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This is super cool. My only feedback is that you should make it look more like OutRun - sega blue skies, the odd cloud sprite- but otherwise on to a winner

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Hi
Thanks for the great app.
Is there planned to connect with intervals.icu?

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That is a great suggestion, thank you!

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Thank you :slight_smile:

In full transparency, this app has not been received as well as I had hoped, so I do really appreciate the comments on this thread. That being said, it’s probably not worth me doing a full integration for intervals.icu workouts and then activity uploads, at least right now.

If there is more usage, this will be the next big feature I add for sure

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Thanks, pretty much all I want in the description. I’ll give it a go.

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Tried it on a old macbook that can still load chrome and have ble and it works as advertised.

What I really like is that I can easily access my local workout library and load a workout.

I would prefer to enlarge the riding stats and workout profile to capture most of the screen, but could not find a way to do this.

I enjoyed the simplistic approach. I still record my ride on my bike computer, thus the Strava and other apps integration was not an issue.

Your app made me wonder what other web base apps is available. I tried one where I could load a gps data and ride the profile which is a handy feature as well.

From an ease of use and BLE connection point, your app was better.

Best of luck, I hope it takes off.

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Thank you for trying it out! This comment really made my day. I’m a bit confused at how you could still record on your bike computer, as BLE is 1:1 (trainer should only be able to connect to one source at a time), but I do appreciate your comments.

As for making the workout profile bigger, I completely agree. I have just implemented a maximise feature, along with some other features. Hope this helps.

ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter

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The trainer can connect with BLE and ANT+ simultaneously and the same for my HR strap and the bike computer as well. As it is my gravel bike it also has a separate power meter. I do the same when I ride with MyWhoosh as I am just to lazy to spend time importing stuff. Plus it useful to compare power data and see how often I need to calibrate either.