I have a number of friends that frequent another bike shop that sells Diretos. (we sell Hammers at my shop) My friends didn’t like the price point on the H2 and I honestly can’t blame them so they went across town for the Diretos. Out of 7 people that I know that purchased Diretos, 6 have been replaced. 4 broke belts, the other two had power problems.
Elite’s communication from customer service hasn’t been very good, but they have taken care of all 6 issues. The first 4 people that had issues all received replacement Direto’s and the latter two both received free upgrades to the new model.
I just figured out a trick for the sprints this last week that should help across all smart trainers. As riders, we’re prone to spin up our cadence a bit right before a bit power change. This is great for extended intervals, but wrecks the whole point of sprints. Sprints are about fiber recruitment. To get more out of your sprint, take 5 to 10 rpm off of your cadence in the last 10 seconds leading up to the sprint and then delay your sprint until you’re a full second into the sprint interval. You’ll feel the difference the first time you do it this way.
I’ve had the Direto for about a year plus now and I’ve learnt to love resistance mode. Only use ERG for the first few minutes of warmup. It’s also more engaging to shift for sprints.
I have the same experience, my Direto is pretty good at repsonding but as a mountain biker I train in a low gear (36 x 18 mainly). See below it going from 40%-150% ftp in approx 3 secs.
The calibration number should be within 5 either side apparently. If its over this you need to contact them and they will give you instructions on how to tighten the belt (although youtube would save you the hassle)
Did Carpathian Peak +2 today (holy moly that was the toughest workout I’ve done) and the trainer did well. I did the Elite app calibration and tightened the belt as suggested. Did a calibration in TR as well. The ramps were much slower though, so I’m not sure how it’ll do next week in the short VO2 stuff. I’m going to try ERG mode for those one more time and probably just change to resistance/slope mode if ERG isn’t cutting it.
They are most probably tweaking the control loop gain(s) - not really “buffering [of] required trainer power level”. In erg mode, the trainer receives a power target, which follows the “blue blocks” of TR with a 1-2 sec advance; the trainer runs a closed loop on its power output vs the power target, and modulates the resistance to achieve this match. Higher gains will make the trainer respond faster, with the potential downside of affecting control stability; so faster response, but more over/undershoots, and less stability if you vary the power by changing your cadence and/or gearing. The need for unit-specific gains points to a hardware variability issue; if the object you are controlling is identical from unit to unit, you don’t need to change your control loop parameters.
I’d not done short intervals yet in my Direto until yesterday. Here’s 15/15s from Flume. Responds pretty well. I have a Direto from 2018. The response time seems to be fine. Not sure why Elite would have changed the algorithm in later models…
Look at the massive overshoot at the start of the 4th rep, and then the oscillation all the way through. The reason then needed to update this is because it was really poor.
