Practicing with Pivo

So with gas prices plus the new commute to my trainer's interim barn being problematic for weekly lessons, I decided to get more aggressive about seeing if I could get the Pivo to work for remote lessons. I know many people using it successfully, and Jen published a really helpful tutorial (although it's Pivo Cast now, not Pivo Meet I guess?), so I figured that was a good jumping off point. T volunteered to be my guinea pig, and we picked an evening after work to give it a whirl. I had already ridden Ruby in the morning so Cinna was my victim of choice. I have excessively bad timing, and the forecast was calling for rain, so we had a pretty narrow window to figure things out before a thunderstorm rolled through. 

Cinna: "what fresh hell is this?"

It actually went relatively seamlessly once I figured out how to swap from the front facing camera to the back one, lol. T and I had a little trouble with the audio, which could have been either my headphones or the cell reception at her barn, so I plan to practice again with a different pair of headphones and have DH sitting inside on WiFi to see if that solves the problem. I also ordered another WiFi extender for the tack shed, since the WiFi from the house reaches that far but gets dicey in the far end of the arena (my Amazon music gets laggy down there some rides), so hopefully those changes fix the problems and I'll be ready to embark on virtual lessons with TrainerB!

Me and Cinna thanking T and Karma for their patience at the end!

I didn't ride for long, just the basics of w/t/c each direction to confirm the Pivo could follow me at various speeds. My phone isn't the latest and greatest/newest model, so that was one of my bigger concerns. It seemed to work okay so I'm comfortable doing some more testing and then hopefully getting something set up with TrainerB! T helpfully pointed out that if I'm not spending the equivalent of the lesson on gas (which definitely happened the last few times 🤢), I could....afford lessons on BOTH horses? Mind blowing, I know. Fingers crossed! TrainerB takes virtual lessons with her trainer (although she was using the Pixem system last time I saw the end of one of hers), so I'm hoping she'll be able to adapt pretty quickly to the Pivo interface!