This Little Box Lets You Collect Your Peloton Data on Your Phone
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The Good
- Easy to install
- Shows up as a standard Bluetooth power meter
- Compatible with phone apps and many sports watches
- Cheaper than other solutions like power pedals
The Bad- No speed or distance data
- Doesn’t work on Bike+
Table of Contents
I’ve let my subscription lapse on my Peloton Bike. I just didn’t feel like it was worth $44/month now that my interests have shifted and I spend more time running than cycling. But I would still like to ride it sometimes, and I would really like those workouts to show up on my Garmin watch, or at least my Strava account. That’s where the DFC comes in. Its name is short for Data Fitness Connector, and it wirelessly broadcasts power and cadence data from a Peloton Bike to devices like your phone or fitness watch.
I was a bit nervous at first. The only reviews I could find were pretty old, and the Reddit posts were mostly people asking “does this thing still work?” and, auspiciously, usually getting a “yes.” The only place to buy it is a Kickstarter-like website called Crowd Supply. Some of those Reddit posts mentioned a long shipping time. Some of the Reddit posts mentioned needing to write to the developer about bugs. I decided I was up for an adventure, so I placed an order, forking over $125 plus shipping and tax (total $142.31).
The gods blessed me. I had the DFC in my hands just three days later, and it delivered on all its promises. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect—it’s missing a few features by design—but overall I’m a happy customer. And, importantly, now I know that it works and I know how to make it work.
Why a wireless power meter is so handy
The DFC is a little box that plugs into the back of your Peloton’s screen. (More about the installation process below.) It reads the cadence and output data from the Bike, and broadcasts it over Bluetooth.
On a Peloton, you have three numbers, as the instructors tell you at the beginning of every class. Cadence (how fast your legs are moving) is on the left; resistance (how hard it is to pedal) is on the right; and output, which reflects both numbers, is in the middle. “Output” is Peloton lingo for what cyclists call “power.” If you’ve taken power zone classes, you know that you can build whole workouts around power. You can gauge your progress over time by how much power you can sustain. Power is to cyclists what pace is to runners.
So in the same way that my Garmin watch knows how fast I’m running outdoors, and can coach me to run at different paces, a cycling watch or app would need to know how much power you’re pedaling with, and it can coach you to pedal at different power levels. A power meter also allows you to log your workouts, and for the workout to say something more meaningful than “you rode your bike for 30 minutes.” For serious cyclists, power meter pedals are one of the ways you might get the data to do this. You can add power meter pedals to your Peloton Bike, but they're expensive, usually running $500 and up—way out of my budget.
That's why I wanted the DFC. Sure, I can manually log a 30-minute ride, but I want a record of what I did on the Bike. If you have an active Peloton subscription, workouts are saved to your account and you can set them up to sync to Strava or other apps. But without a subscription, what happened on the Bike stayed on the Bike. That is, until I got this little gadget.
What the DFC can and can’t do
The DFC broadcasts your power data (“output,” in Peloton terms), and your cadence (how fast your legs were moving, in rotations per minute). This is enough to follow power-based workouts, gauge your FTP, and do other useful cycling training things.
But the DFC does not broadcast your speed or distance. Every time I finish a ride, my Garmin watch tells me I went 0.00 miles. (I edit this manually, swapping in the number that appears on the Bike’s screen, for completeness’ sake.) The DFC’s developers know that this is a problem, and one of these days they might find a way to broadcast speed data. But for now, that’s a number you just don’t get.
The DFC also works on the Peloton Bike but not the Bike+. (The Bike+ is the more expensive version, with a swiveling screen and auto resistance. The standard Peloton model is the regular Bike, without the plus.) The developers know this, too. They looked into making the DFC compatible with both, and ultimately said it’s not happening anytime soon. Sorry, Bike+ folks.
The DFC does not require a Peloton subscription to work. When your subscription is expired, you can’t take the normal classes or scenic rides or Lanebreak (I have to admit I miss Lanebreak) but you can still do a “just ride.” The DFC should be able to gather and broadcast its data just fine from any ride, including a Just Ride. I’ve only personally tested it with the Just Ride on a Bike with an expired subscription.
Installation (and a bonus cable you’ll want to buy)
Now for the fun part. The DFC comes in a bubble-wrapped package containing:
The DFC itself: a box a little smaller than a mint tin, weighing almost nothing
A nice long USB-A to USB-C power cable
A short data cable that has what looks like headphone jack connectors on both ends
The current version of the DFC has a black plastic housing with a wooden bottom. I've seen photos of an older version that is red.
Taking a tip from a Reddit post, I also ordered myself a USB cable adapter that will let me power the DFC from the tablet itself, without having to run an extra cord to a wall outlet. According to the documentation, not all USB cables will work, so I stuck with one that I knew others had had success with. You plug it into the included power cable like so:
The installation process is simple and quick, but make sure to keep your wits about you. (I definitely forgot to plug in one of the cables and was perplexed for a moment about why it didn’t work.) Basically, you’re going to insert the DFC into the data cable that runs from the Bike part of the Peloton up to the tablet. This means putting one headphone-like data cable into each of the two little round ports. The instructions say it doesn’t matter which is which. Then the little USB port is to power the DFC. That’s it.
So, the first step is to go to the back of your Peloton tablet, and find the cable with the “P” logo. Unplug that. If it’s clipped to the power cable next to it, you may want to undo that clip.
You plug that “P” cable into the DFC, then plug the little data cable into the other port and back into the “P” socket on the tablet. Now that we've done our little surgery, we once again have a connection going from the Bike body into the tablet. It just has a little DFC box in the middle now.
The next step is to connect the power. The USB-C end goes into the DFC, and if you didn’t get the special adapter, you can just run the big end of the power cable into any USB power source, like a wall charger block.
If you got the adapter that I did, look a few inches to the left of that “P” logo socket you were just working with. You’ll see a battery icon. Under that battery icon is a secret charging port that takes a USB micro plug. (If you had the right cable, you could have been charging your phone while you ride this whole time.) Plug the adapter into there, and make sure the power cable is connected to the DFC. Power is now running from the tablet to the DFC.
Here’s the finished setup. You can see the secret charging port at the top left. The data port with the “P” logo is on the right. You can now tidy things up with some double-sided tape and cable management clips.
Pairing devices with the DFC
Now we’re almost ready to ride: We just have to pair the DFC with the device that will read from it. The DFC developers have a compatibility table here, where they note which devices have and have not successfully connected. It’s an old document, and many of the devices listed are older ones. But! It sure seems like any device that can connect to a Bluetooth power meter is likely to work. I tested nearly every device I had on hand that’s supposed to be able to connect to a power meter. They all worked:
Apple Watch Series 10 ✅
Coros Pace Pro watch ✅
Garmin Forerunner 265S watch ✅
Zwift app on iPhone ✅
Wahoo app on iPhone ✅
Wahoo app on Android ✅
The only device that did not work was a Garmin Forerunner 165. I couldn’t find the menu option to connect a power meter. Turns out the 165 doesn’t support power meters! That explains that. This watch might actually work with the DFC if I installed the beta firmware that makes the DFC broadcast speed and cadence rather than power and cadence. But since I’d rather keep the device’s current functionality, I didn’t attempt the upgrade.
Happily, the DFC can pair to two devices at once. That means I can use it to track a workout on my Garmin watch, while also having it paired to an iPad running Zwift. (Zwift is a hugely popular combination training app, video game, and uncanny-valley virtual world for cyclists. If you know what a “power meter” is, you already know what Zwift is.)
One important caveat: the Peloton seems to only send power data while you have a ride going. That means if you are sitting on the Bike and pedaling while setting up your devices, but you haven’t officially started your ride yet, you’ll see that a power meter is connected but that the power is 0. Once you start the ride from the Peloton screen, the numbers will start coming through to your app or device.
After a few quick tests to be sure the hardware was working, I completed my first actual workout. For 30 minutes, I put on the most energetic playlist that Spotify offered me (power ballads, mostly—thank you, Meat Loaf) and did a workout in the style of the Power Zone Endurance rides I remember fondly from my Peloton days. I did an easy warmup, some short bursts of high cadence, and then alternated by songs: one song at a power zone 2 kind of output (100 watts or so) and the next song in zone 3 (130ish … I’m guessing at targets here, since I haven’t done one of these rides in forever and I don’t have my zones calibrated).
When I was done, I took a photo of the metrics on the Peloton screen—because they’d otherwise disappear when I turned the Bike off—and I compared them to the readings I got from my watch, viewed later in the Garmin Connect app. I was expecting them to be close, with the caveat that I may not have started and ended the Bike and the watch workouts at the exact same time.
The results? A near perfect match.
Total output: 219 kJ on both
Average power: 115 W on both
Max power: 198 on both
Average cadence: 85 on both
Max cadence: 134 on Peloton, 133 via DFC
Distance: 9.01 miles on the Peloton, 0.00 via DFC
I’d call that a pass with flying colors, on everything except that known issue with speed and distance.
How I’m using the DFC
Since that was my first-ever ride with a power meter connected to my Garmin watch, the watch was able to calculate some training metrics for me, the better to set up future training. I’m using a Forerunner 265S, and it calculated a cycling VO2max for me, which is separate from my running VO2max—although in this case they happened to be the same number.
It also calculated what it thinks my FTP is. This is a performance metric that is both a marker of your fitness and a benchmark for setting up power zones for training. On the Peloton, the only way to get your FTP is to do a 20-minute test ride. This is a grueling and valuable experience, but it’s nice to be able to skip that step. Garmin estimated an FTP of 154 for me based on that first ride, which sounds pretty reasonable given what I remember of my past FTP results, modified by the fact that I haven’t been on the bike for a while. I expect this to be refined over time as I do more rides.
And since the watch now has those metrics available, it’s able to suggest workouts for me. I can see that tomorrow it would like me to do a 39-minute ride at a steady 110 watts, and that I could replace my next recovery run with a recovery ride (targets provided) if I’d like.
The DFC also opens up the possibility of using other apps. I could get on the Zwift bandwagon ($19.99/month), or choose some other cycling membership that provides rides and workouts, like Wahoo X ($14.95/month). Heck, I could even get the Peloton App+ membership ($24/month) and play the rides on a phone or tablet while tracking the data on my watch or on Wahoo’s free app—and I’d still be saving 20 bucks. Or I can pedal along to Meat Loaf for free.
The DFC does the thing I bought it for, and for that I am grateful. It gives me a way to digitally track bike workouts without paying Peloton $44/month. I can sync my workouts through Garmin or Wahoo to Strava, or however I might like to arrange my data. The DFC installed as easily as promised, and I found the documentation accurate, if sparse. For doing its job, and doing it well, I give it a solid 4 stars.
But something is missing. Specifically, speed and distance data. Every workout shows up as 0.00 miles, until I manually edit the workout. This is fine for my current purposes—I only really need power data for the workouts I like to do—but a full-featured device would provide speed as well.
I also wish the developer’s site were updated frequently enough that I knew for sure that it was still an active project. There are teasers for potential future updates, like one that might be able to broadcast speed in the future, but I don’t know whether those are coming or not. I don't know if this device will still be for sale indefinitely, or if stock will run out and not be replenished. Also, it's a little thing, but I wish there was an indicator LED that would light up to let me know the device had power and was transmitting.
All that said—it seems to be a small project by a small team, and they’ve made a solid product that does what it says it does, and costs as much as a mere three months of that Peloton membership I no longer need.
Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, has written two books, and is a certified personal trainer. She’s been writing about health, fitness, and science for over a decade, and can front squat 225 pounds.
