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I have bought a Garmin Cadence Sensor 2. After installing it on the bike and rotating the cranks to wake it up, theoretically I should be able to pair it with my iPhone but it doesn’t appear in Bluetooth Settings. The documentation is abysmal and doesn’t go into any useful detail on the pairing procedure. What’s the trick to get it to show up?

(The iPhone is a 12 Mini running iOS 14.2, but I couldn’t get it to work with my iPhone X on iOS 13 either.)

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    Try a new battery in the cadence sensor. There's no telling how long the sensor sat in a warehouse before being sold to Garmin, and there's not telling how long the battery that came with the sensor sat in a Garmin warehouse before being matched with your sensor.
    – Andrew Henle
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 12:18
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    Actually, what do you mean pair the sensor to the phone? I believe you’d need an app as an intermediary, I.e. you pair the sensor to the phone via the app. And while you can use Strava on a phone as a bike computer, I am not sure if it supports Bluetooth sensor connections. They only just brought back BT heart rate monitor connections on their app, and I think they haven’t implemented connections to other sensor types directly on the app.
    – Weiwen Ng
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 12:49
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    iOS Bluetooth Settings shows only devices that have profiles iOS can handle without extra apps. So, heart rate and speed sensors, MIDI keyboards, etc all require a separate app.
    – ojs
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 13:53
  • It’s a new battery since I started fiddling with this a couple of months ago. The device wakes up and gives me 5s of green flashes, not the red flashes that indicate low battery. That’s not the problem.
    – Robert Atkins
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 19:54
  • There’s a bike cadence sensor profile in the BLE standard, which made me think it might at least appear there.
    – Robert Atkins
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 20:20

2 Answers 2

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It seems like it could work using their Garmin Connect App.

See Page 5 below.

https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/cadencespeedsensors2/EN-US/Cadence_Speed_Sensors_2_OM_EN-US.pdf

See this snippet too:

https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/cadencespeedsensors2/EN-US/GUID-E87E78BB-03DD-48C1-AA67-A69E591B01FC.html

However, I think optimally this thing is designed to be used with a bike computer Garmin Head Unit vs. a phone as I am not sure how it will display the cadence info as you ride. Note I never used my phone as a bike computer so perhaps there is a way to do that.

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  • You’ll notice the heading of that section is “Pairing the speed sensor with your smartphone” (emphasis mine.) The cadence sensor does not appear at all in the Garmin Connect app’s list of devices.
    – Robert Atkins
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 19:52
  • IIRC Garmin will find all sensors but it’s listed as a number so it won’t say Cadence it will be a number your looking for once paired it. It can be done as I’ve done it and also paired wahoo speed and cadence with Garmin head units
    – Dan K
    Commented Dec 15, 2020 at 8:48
  • Neither page 5 of the PDF manual, nor the equivalent web page (they’re exactly the same, it seems?) mentions what software to “pair” the cadence sensor with. If you find the cadence sensor in the list of devices available in the Garmin app I’d love to see a screenshot as it’s not in mine.
    – Robert Atkins
    Commented Dec 15, 2020 at 9:58
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The Garmin Cadence Sensor 2 will not pair with an iPhone via the Garmin Connect app, nor directly from iOS Bluetooth Settings. You need to use an entirely different app—I have successfully paired it via Cadence and the Wahoo iOS app.

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