When I bought a Tacx Neo 3M trainer, I decided to set my partner's bike up on the old first generation Tacx Neo. It was still pretty functional, if a little noisy, and I thought it might be fun to ride together on a virtual cycling platform. Prior to this, her bike was mounted on an old non-smart Cateye CycleSimulater trainer.

With a switch to a smart trainer and a virtual cycling platform came the need for easy to manage gear shifting. I'd had the bike set up with old Campagnolo 8-speed gears with Ergo-levers. But I had an 11-speed cassette mounted on the Neo trainer. Poking around in my parts bin unearthed a pair of Shimano rear mechs, one 9-speed and one 10-speed, and a bar end shifter that could be set in friction mode. I swapped out the Campagnolo rear mech and installed the 10-speed Shimano mech with the bar end shifter set in friction mode. All was well with that arrangement, except gear shifting was a little inconvenient with the bar end shifter.

In which I test (and implement) some alternative wiring possibilities for SRAM eTap gear shifters

The SRAM eTap Aero groupset was released in 2015 with a version aimed at road bikes where the gear change controls were switches in the brake levers, and which communicated with the front and rear derailleurs via a proprietary wireless signal. For time trial bikes, the eTap aero was released, where switches mounted on the aero bars were wired to a "blipbox", which wirelessly relayed commands to the gear mechs. Typically, one would set up a pair of switches (the "blips") on the base bar and a second pair of switches (the "clics") on the ends of the aero extensions. The blipbox has four sockets, two for upshift and two for downshift - each clic or blip switch is connected via one socket. The blipbox also has some buttons for shifting. The annoyance there is that the size of the blipbox makes it difficult to tuck it away in the time trial frame.