On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services

I took my Fitbit off when Google announced the acquisition. Kinda hoping PineTime will be a good alternative when a more polished version becomes available.

I still have my Fitbit data and even my old Google location history backed up. I wish more projects focused on importing from takeouts of proprietary services.

fouc• 6 years ago

I hadn't heard about google's attempt to acquire fitbit. It doesn't sound like it's gone through yet.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/3/21312383/google-fibit-acqu...

OnACoffeeBreak2• 6 years ago

For a list of various utilities that work with fitness trackers: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/tools

hdasika• 6 years ago

"Since Garmin at least made money on the hardware, collecting my health data is just icing on the cake; for Strava, my health data is the cake."

I dont see a difference between what Garmin and Strava do to your data. Ultimately, Strava is trying to provide you some more insights using your health data. It ultimately depends whether you want it or not. Isn't this the same with all the services these days?

skummetmaelk• 6 years ago

That's like saying Google collects user data _only_ to improve search. We all know it goes much deeper than that.

calcifer• 6 years ago

Ultimately, Strava is trying to provide you some more insights using your health data.

No, Strava is trying to monetize my data. That I can get some insights from their monetization attempts is incidental.

makomk2• 6 years ago

It's not that incidental. From what I can tell, Strava's business model is about selling users more detailed analysis of and insight into their own health and performance data.

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

I think what the author is trying to say here is that Garmin has a way of making money off them—selling hardware—and thus doesn't need to sell user data as well. Strava has no way of monetizing outside of selling user data.

I'm not sure this is entirely true though, I've seen hardware companies sell out their users for a few bucks. Likewise, Strava has ways to make money from users—via Strava Premium services.

I have no idea how well these particular companies handle data specifically so it's hard to say.

maxerickson3• 6 years ago

Strava turned off most of their free features and is now pretty much a subscription service.

nradov• 6 years ago

In addition to membership fees, Strava also gets revenue from marketing partnerships. Brands pay them to set up custom "challenges" which Strava users join to try and win prizes or contribute to charity. They also have sponsored integrations with several device vendors so that every activity you record with one of those devices is a clickable ad.

matsemann7• 6 years ago

I pay monthly for Strava, so you are very wrong. You shouldn't spread false information.

So, it's not like the old meme about one being the product if one doesn't pay...

xg155• 6 years ago

Ultimately, Strava is trying to provide you some more insights using your health data. It ultimately depends whether you want it or not. Isn't this the same with all the services these days?

If this were all, they wouldn't need dark patterns to manipulat you into giving them their health data even though you actually want something completely different from the service.

matsemann7• 6 years ago

Your heart rate is health data. Uploading an activity includes pulse data, which is useful to analyze to see performance etc. Not having health data on Strava would make the service meaningless. Stop spreading this FUD all over the thread. It's not a dark pattern, uploading this data is exactly what Strava is made for...

j88439h842• 6 years ago

Does this take data from the Garmin web API or directly from the watch hardware, without uploading it to Garmin?

jordan8013• 6 years ago

It takes it directly from the .fit file on the watch, uses some software to parse the file. You can get the .fit file on a windows machine by plugging the watch into it and accessing it like a USB.

Not sure about linux, but I've heard Mac requires some third party software.

makruiten• 6 years ago

Linux works too.

js22• 6 years ago

No third party software needed on mac. The watch mounts as a mass storage device then you just copy the fit files off of it. You may have to check the watch settings and make sure that the USB setting is mass storage mode.

Edit: apparently some Garmin watches only support Media Transfer Protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx-iTg7...

For these you have to use an MTP client on macOS such as Android File Transfer.

OnACoffeeBreak2• 6 years ago

I see a bunch of .fit files in <watch_name>/Primary/GARMIN/Activity/ when I plug my watch into a USB port on my PC. So, you can definitely get them off your device without connecting to Strava or Garmin Connect.

huhtenberg2• 6 years ago

Hold on. So how does one go about retrieving the data from a Garmin watch?

Garmin app's insistence on always needing a connection to their servers has always been bothersome, but now that the servers are fubared, it turns out that I can't even get the data off the tracker and onto an iPhone, because that too somehow needs a server connection. Finding an alternative had suddenly became a high priority task.

asimilator• 6 years ago

My Fenix 5 shows up as a mass storage device when I plug in the usb cable to my computer. You can pull .fit files off that, which contain everything the watch records.

js22• 6 years ago

The Fenix 6 and 945 only support MTP, not mass storage. For those you need a third-party MTP client on macOS such as Android File Transfer.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx-iTg7...

huhtenberg2• 6 years ago

I'll be damned, my Forerunner did show up as a mass storage device!

For whatever reason I assumed that the cable with its funny looking 4-contact clip was used just for charging the tracker.

Gotta say, this looks very promising. Thanks for the tip.

matsemann7• 6 years ago

You just connect the usb part of the charger to a device. The garmin unit shows up as a storage device, and all activities are there as files. Can also add routes etc that way without using the app. If anything, Garmin is better in that regard compared to other brands.

scottru• 6 years ago

DCRainmaker has a specific guide for a range of Garmin watches and machines - https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/07/how-to-upload-your-garmi...

ISL2• 6 years ago

As everyone else has said -- a USB connection is generally sufficient.

If you're looking to see inside the FIT files, here's my (unmaintained, single-purpose) repo for doing so (a wrapper to a perl library by Kiyokazu Suto that does all the work).

https://github.com/4kbt/ParseVivosmartHR

Using it, I've been able to parse the output from a VivoSmart HR and a Fenix 3HR. I was happy to see that the HN-linked article had gpsbabel support; I haven't yet checked to see whether gpsbabel extracts all the other channels, too.

There are FIT files for 24-hr data in addition to activities; the 24-hr data are among the most interesting to me.

Garmin makes really great hardware -- I hope that this incident spurs them to open the SDK and firmware further to improve the resilience of their products.

lazyjeff2• 6 years ago

Not for Garmin, but I have saved my data from the servers for the Microsoft Band [https://jeffhuang.com/extracting_my_data_from_the_microsoft_...] and Hello Sense [https://jeffhuang.com/extracting_my_data_from_the_hello_sens...] before they both shut down. Basically, you can MITM to find the REST API calls, save the token, and mimic the calls to get your data.

I was thinking of one day editing the apps for wearables to direct them my own server, and then setting up a basic CRUD-like endpoint server to keep discontinued cloud-based wearables from becoming garbage by allowing them to have basic functionality. But haven't had the time, and would have to look into the legality of it first.

userbinator5• 6 years ago

But haven't had the time, and would have to look into the legality of it first.

Random thoughts:

- anything to prevent the creation of more e-waste is much appreciated

- if you distribute only binary patches/diffs, you won't be in violation of distributing other's copyrighted IP

- don't let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do with the hardware you own

JeremyNT• 6 years ago

As others have said, you just plug it into any computer with a USB port. This is one edge Garmin has over some of its competitors. Most of the device functions are fully usable without any sort of internet access or even a phone.

This outage, ironically, highlights that strength. One can hope that Garmin is reminded of how valuable this interoperability is after this event and continues their commitment to it :)

dTal3• 6 years ago

It’s exactly the data I need, in the format that I want; no more, and no less. Plus, the output is a single html file that I can share directly with nothing more than a simple link. No analytics, no cookies. Just the data I’ve chosen to share with you.

I click the link and am presented with the familiar blank page of needs-javascript. Oh dear. What has uBlock stopped this time?

* maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com

* cdnjs.cloudflare.com

* rawcdn.githack.com (also a cookie from here)

* code.jquery.com

* cdn.jsdelivr.net

Not quite the "single html file, no analytics, no cookies" that was promised.

jordan8013• 6 years ago

They were referring to the output file their code produces... Not the .fit parser.

dTal3• 6 years ago

The link I'm talking about is literally the hyperlink in the text "nothing more than a simple link". It leads to a file titled "speed-2020-07-21-16-10-44-map.html" which I assume is meant to be the output.

j88439h842• 6 years ago

Is it possible to get data off a Fitbit without uploading it to cloud?

krtkush• 6 years ago

I don't think so, unfortunately.

FloatArtifact2• 6 years ago

This project is really interesting to liberate your smart watch.

https://gadgetbridge.org/

m-p-32• 6 years ago

I've been using it since I acquired my first Pebble (then the Pebble Steel, then the Pebble Time Steel).

In fact I'm still using it, from my Mi Band 3, to the Mi Band 4 and now the Amazfit Bip.

The folks behind it are doing a great job, and I'm glad they're doing it.

mjsir911• 6 years ago

And some forks with garmin devices:

- https://github.com/mjsir911/gadgetbridge (mine)

- https://github.com/mormegil-cz/Gadgetbridge/tree/garmin-wip

m-p-32• 6 years ago

Just wondering, is the original Gadgetbridge repo not willing to accept code to merge?

They're also on Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/!KlgIJeiotNGZkxSqRi:matrix.org

alex_duf2• 6 years ago

I kind of regret buying a Fitbit, unfortunately it's not part of that list!

matsemann7• 6 years ago

The long unsubstantiated rant about Strava seemed unnecessary. It drowned the interesting part about how one can do cool visualizations tailored to one's own needs.

There are soo many ways to look st data. I use Garmin Connect, Training Peaks, Strava, Elevate. They all have something the other misses. Making a something myself tailored for me would be cool.

Edit: the reason I'm downplaying the attack on Strava, is that it doesn't really know that much. It knows the explicit activities synced, and whatever it can derive from that (where I live and work for instance). But Garmin, Polar, Fitbit etc knows sooo much more. My pulse and movements during the whole day which can be used to corroborate lots of stuff, when I sleep etc.

davegauer• 6 years ago

I thought the Strava rant was appropriate in demonstrating that bunnie was aware of and tried alternatives before he wrote his own software.

As for "unsubstatiated": part of it is _well_ substantiated: his screenshots clearly demonstrate Strava's questionable interface choices. :-)

matsemann7• 6 years ago

As I've explained elsewhere here, uploading health data to Strava is the core feature it's used for. Asking for that is not a dark pattern, as it's pretty useless without..

xg155• 6 years ago

The strava rant was a clear example of both surveilance capitalism and dark patterns in action. That was very clear demonstration why you should not trust public clouds.

I also don't see how any of it is "unsubstantiated".

the reason I'm downplaying the attack on Strava, is that it doesn't really know that much

Oh so they only steal a little bit of the cash I have with me, not the whole thing. That's great!

matsemann7• 6 years ago

Please don't twist words like that, it makes for a dumb debate.

Anyways, what one uploads to Strava is what one wants to share and have analyzed. If you don't give them permission to hold your health data, then it's no point in using the service. It's not really a dark pattern. It's not like it collects stuff about you in the background, one explicitly has to sync activities there. So you are wrong, they're not stealing a shit.

ramones13• 6 years ago

100% agree.

The take that asking a question and verifying the decision twice isn't a "dark pattern" it's knowing that people often don't fully read. A true dark pattern is hiding the "confirm" button or swapping primary/secondary.

Also the part about "make fat returns by monetizing my private data, including my health information" is 100% unfounded. Strava monetizes VERY well off of adding additional features for subscribers like many services these days. I've been using Strava for a month free, and they do a really great balance of teasing the features you're missing out on without being too pushy.

Shared40414• 6 years ago

The point of open source is not to ritualistically compile our stuff from source. It’s the awareness that technology is not magic: that there is a trail of breadcrumbs any of us could follow to liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation. Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services.

This is the best phrasing of this concept that I remember having seen.

smichel173• 6 years ago

Yes, FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers.

Proprietary software gives developers power over users. Typically, Developers seek this power in order to extract money from users (sometimes in reasonable amounts, other times not). Unfortunately, power is abused. By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork.

dimitrios12• 6 years ago

It's not about power dynamics, it's about liberty. And ultimately, liberty is about autonomy. Having the freedom to do what you choose if you so need to. Free as in freedom right? Stallman was always talking about liberty.

wtallis5• 6 years ago

I find it amusing to recall that Stallman's Free Software efforts were more or less kicked off by frustration with crappy closed-source printer drivers. 40 years later, being subjected to abusive behavior from your printer has become a near-universal experience.

jeppesen-io• 6 years ago

Yet FLOSS often has very poor UX - the users are very self selecting

vannevar• 6 years ago

...FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers.

Developers rarely own the rights to their own code. It's actually about the power dynamic between capital and users. The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold, makes the rules") is nowhere more clear than in the software industry, with its lopsided clickthrough licenses and terms of service.

userbinator5• 6 years ago

By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork.

Unfortunately this isn't really true for large and complex FLOSS, e.g. web browsers. For a lot of the little user-hostile decisions they have taken, it would take me far more time to get the source and all its dependencies, figure out how to correctly build it (which can itself include a nontrivial toolchain with its own effort to set up), find where to make that tiny change I wanted to the source, and recompile and test; than to simply use a debugger to find the right place in the binary to modify directly.

Open-source doesn't necessarily mean easy to take control; and neither does closed source mean the opposite. I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill, because that's what gives you the true power to take control.

throw7• 6 years ago

But if you don't have the source, isn't it magic?

Shared40414• 6 years ago

For me personally at least, discovering open source meant learning that even if something looks like magic, it has source code behind it somewhere. Nothing is magic, everything is science(or engineering), even if that is hidden/obscured from the end user.

As a result of this, anything can be reimplemented/replaced, if you or someone else have knowledge on how to do so. This in turn means that it is possible to escape from unethical services, thus the article.

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

Attention: We have a hostage situation. Might be a world record.

Shared40414• 6 years ago

Adobe has entered the chat.

All joking aside, I recognize that this is strong language, but it certainly describes the tactics used.

Although obviously no one is in immediate physical danger, with the exception of medical equipment. Even that I'm not sure of, I've just heard hearsay.

Legogris• 6 years ago

This echoes how I think of Bitcoin; an alternative to government and private banking, not as a replacement but its very existence shifts the hostage-like power dynamics we have grown accustomed to.

ex_amazon_sde• 6 years ago

liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation
Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services

This person is describing the goals of Free Software and community-driven projects.

"Open Source" merely refers to using an OSI-approved license, without any implication about empowering users and improving the power balance.

jacquesl• 6 years ago

Thanks for this. It’s exactly what I’m interested in as I play with my Garmin and kayak this summer! I loved Strava in the early days, but as it tries to be a full social network, it’s lost much of its charm for me. I’m more interested in routes and stats, than what some athlete is doing in Chamonix.

walrus01• 6 years ago

For anyone that's interested in doing this own visualization of .gpx files. This is GPLv3 licensed:

https://www.gpxsee.org/

If you have an old Android phone laying around that can run at least android 5/6, there's lots of good tracking applications that can run persistently and create a .gpx file written to disk in a location of your choice under /sdcard/. May not even be necessary to purchase a smart watch if you don't want heart rate.

I recommend this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...

One of the things I particularly like about that app is that it's fully configurable for how often you want it to get a GPS fix (has a direct impact on battery life), what filename prefix to create and where to create it, whether to create a new file every day or every session, and many other toggles and knobs in the options.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

There is also https://f-droid.org/app/de.dennisguse.opentracks

lazyjeff2• 6 years ago

GPSLogger (the one walrus01 linked to) is a gem. I've been using it continuously for 7 years. Not all location trackers are the same.

It lets you log with cell tower but fall back to GPS if the accuracy is poor. Like walrus01 says, it's very configurable in how accurate you want it to be versus battery usage, or if you want to optimize it some way (like not record if it hasn't been moving).

While there were monthly crashes in the first two years I used it, the past 5 years it's been rock solid (running 24/7 with maybe one or two crashes for basically 5 years). You don't want to discover that one day the app hasn't been logging data for the past couple days. In comparison, the Android OS probably crashes about once a month for me.

It can automatically upload to various cloud storage places (Dropbox, Google Drive, but even FTP) so you can generate charts on a server with a script.

Truly open source, low battery usage, saves in multiple file formats, and the developer is active on Github with issues. Making a background mobile app is not easy because Android is constantly trying to reduce background battery drain or background process spyware.

jordan8013• 6 years ago

For those wondering, I just accessed and parsed a .FIT file.

I plugged my watch's charging cable into a USB port on my Linux rig (works the same for windows). Navigated to GARMIN. And immediately saw .FIT files.

To get to your activities, navigate to GARMIN->ACTIVITY. You should be able to see when the files were created, so you can figure out which one you want to view. Each is it's own activity.

Next you need a FIT file parser. I'm a NodeJS guy, so I did an NPM search and found "fit-file-parser". I made a quick project, and wrote out the code necessary.

In all of five minutes I had a JSON object with my run.

Maybe I should engineer a simple, single page HTML app to open, parse, and render the statistics? I feel like when I get done Connect will be back online and this will be an afterthought :P.

lightbulbjim2• 6 years ago

You might like GoldenCheetah.

andrewcooke• 6 years ago

if anyone is interested, i have a project that allows you to process and visualize data from garmin devices (FIT files in general). it includes a command (ch2 fit records <filename>) that dumps the contents of a file. it's not got many users and is a little unpolished still, but recently i added docker support which makes it easier to try out.

https://github.com/andrewcooke/choochoo

lsllc• 6 years ago

As I take my daily runs through the woods (with my Garmin 935!) I have been thinking about the near future and what a 2nd wave of COVID19 might bring. What if we end up with a France/Spain/Italy style hard lockdown? Like troops on the street type lockdown?, can't go out at all except to go directly to the store, neighbors calling 911 on neighbors who go outside (which is how my Italian friends tell me it was in Italy).

I could just go run in the woods in the dark, no-one would know right? And it's highly unlikely I'd be seen at night (a Spanish friend of mine ended up hiking several nights a week in the dark so he wouldn't be seen as he was going stir crazy being trapped inside).

But my GPS data would be uploaded to the cloud! They would know! There would be evidence, fed to the NSA! Would I hear their standard issue kicking in my door!

Of course I could just leave the Garmin at home, but I like my GPS and stats. So now I know how I can pull the data off watch, process it myself and remove it before it can be synced!

Thank you!

/s (a little bit)

RandomBacon• 6 years ago

Yesterday: We need backdoors for everyone's safety.

Tomorrow: We need everything to be cloud-only for everyone's safety.

greesil• 6 years ago

You could just buy a watch. It comes pre-liberated.

tdhz77• 6 years ago

I’ve been following bunnie since I was 11 years old in the days of the original Xbox. I hope others know how important knowledge sharing is. For me, I had no idea what was going on, but the fact that I could try to understand it was enough for me. I’m now 32, and an engineer. I didn’t have money, but this thing called Linux was free. Such great memories.

solarkraft• 6 years ago

The bad news is as I tried to create an account on Strava , all sorts of warning bells went off. The website is full of dark patterns ...

I'm glad I'm not the only one considering these warning signs, but also puzzled why not everybody thinks like that, especially with services that could hold your data hostage. Is it a lack of education, lack of care or careful risk/benefit analysis?

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

Lack of options - available, or known about. You learn about service X. Services online are usually non-substitutable (you can't use Fitbit service with Garmin watch, etc.), and often have network effects (all your runner friends are on Strava). So what is a regular person going to do? The choice is almost always binary: ignore the warning signs and sign up, or do without the entire category of experience altogether.

userbinator5• 6 years ago

I’ve often said that if we convince ourselves that technology is magic, we risk becoming hostages to it. Just recently, I had a brush with this fate, but happily, I was saved by open source.

I was very pleased to discovered an open-source utility called gpsbabel (thank you gpsbabel! I donated!) that can unpack Garmin’s semi-(?)proprietary “.FIT” file format into the interoperable “.GPX” format.

...and how do you think that utility was created? They probably didn't have access to Garmin's source code or documentation for the format. They just "figured it out". Furthermore, whether that utility is open-source doesn't seem to matter here: it's just doing a format conversion.

but it was mostly a matter of finding the right open-source pieces and gluing them together with Python

Replace "open-source" with "freely usable", and the author would've probably been able to accomplish the same end-goal. Gluing together existing software, treating the pieces as black boxes, doesn't show off any advantages of open-source at all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against open-source; I'm just against this rising glorification of it as somehow a be-all and end-all of software freedom. What is worth praise, however, is the rising availability of freely usable software.

To go back to the author's first point, the best way to not "convince ourselves that technology is magic" is to start with a comprehensive low-level education: Computers are just dumb machines executing sequences of instructions, and in a non-hostile environment, you get to choose precisely what instructions they execute.

makomk2• 6 years ago

I think FIT is actually a (somewhat) documented format that's used by a number of non-Garmin devices as well, mostly GPS cycle computers. It's not really any more non-standard than the Garmin extension to GPX being used for heart rate after conversion. Probably a little harder to implement though, given that it's a terse space-optimized binary format. (Though maybe not, since XML namespaces seem to be involved.)

holri• 6 years ago

There is a free hardware/software Smartwatch project: https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

lightbulbjim2• 6 years ago

Cool, but you could also just use software such as GoldenCheetah or rubiTrack.

205guy• 6 years ago

I'm a longtime user of hand-held GPS units for hiking and back-packing. Since before the time of wireless connectivity and social sports portals, these units have had USB cables and downloadable files--and fortunately still do. Garmin provides the BaseCamp software, which is just a local viewer for the files--admittedly, it doesn't have very good maps. But it has always had GPX export and seeing your tracks in Google Earth is way more compelling. So you get your own data on your own machine, and not on someone else's servers.

And this has been one of the reasons I haven't gone to smart-watches (the other is accuracy in terrain). You have to have the app on your phone and pair them together. Even if that workflow is still possible (as demonstrated by the article, it is a fall-back), the default is to require cloud processing. I don't want my tracks stored somewhere else, and even less so if there's a chance of accidentally sharing them publicly. I guess I don't get the sports stats (heart-rate, etc), but that's a small price to pay.

alex_duf2• 6 years ago

Anyone knows if it's possible to do something similar with a Fitbit? Basically extracting the data without having to sync it with fitbit's servers?

andreashansen• 6 years ago

If you have the Fitbit Ionic or Versa, you could develop your own watch app and companion app, where the watch app will extract sensor data and websocket it to the companion app, which in turn could pass the data to your own backend/database. The API documentation is quite good from Fitbit.

andrewshadura• 6 years ago

Gadgetbridge might support it.

phillc73• 6 years ago

I've not seen it mentioned yet in the discussion, but my preferred open source tool for analysing Garmin FIT files is ActivityLog2[1]. Written in Racket, it provides some very nice analysis tools for cycling, running and swimming. Regularly updated and decent blog posts on different aspects by the author.

[1] https://github.com/alex-hhh/ActivityLog2

montebicyclelo• 6 years ago

I mentioned that I do this, with gpsbabel on the Garmin thread the other day, but got downvoted. :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926528

Abishek_Muthian3• 6 years ago

I've stopped wearing my WearOS watch and it now serves as a smart clock for notifications on my desk[1] and fitbit or any other heart rate monitor(even Apple watch) hurts me[2]. So even inexpensive smart watches with open-source firmware (detailed below) where heart rate monitor can be disabled would serve my needs going forward.

Shout out to couple of smartwatch projects, which falls inline with the ethos of the author and anyone who agrees with it.

AsteroidOS[1] - open-source linux based smartwatch firmware. Nice UI/UX, Wayland, good number of hardware support including MTK6580 chipset based inexpensive watches. In my tests about a year back, although the watch with AsteroidOS itself was usable, the sync with the android app was unreliable and could be due to android itself or manufacturer's kill-policy.

PineTime[2] - $24.99, completely accessible, several RTOSes being built, Apps in Rust,Python etc.

[1]https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1281998220118249472

[2]https://abishekmuthian.com/my-experience-with-fitbit-charge-...

[3]https://asteroidos.org/

[4]https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

Abishek_Muthian3• 6 years ago

Bangle.js - There seems to be another nRF52832 based open-source 'hackable' watch albeit double the price of PineTime but aimed at JS developers[5]!

Has anyone got this?

[5]https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js

dariosalvi784• 6 years ago

I have one. It's really nice to develop on and has lots of sensors/features. Dislikes: it's big, very big, and ugly, doesn't have an hardware step counter and the step detection algorithm embedded in Espruino doesn't work at all, the heart rate detection is OKish if you are still, but not very reliable either, battery doesn't last very long probably because of Espruino not being very careful at saving power. It's a fun device, but not great for more serious use.

I hope that the community will improve the software issues and that they will come up with a nicer hardware. Espruino on PineTime would be perfect.

PeterStuer• 6 years ago

When I looked into quantified self IoT a few years back the monetization of the data as the primary component of the business model was ubiquitous. There was one kickstarter project for an open source wristband but it did not seem to get traction.

Has this changed at all? I love the idea of measuring myself in various ways but I want real-time and private access to my data.

zxcvgm• 6 years ago

A bunch of my paddling friends recommended I try Strava. [...]
The bad news is as I tried to create an account on Strava, all sorts of warning bells went off. The website is full of dark patterns, and when I clicked to deny Strava access to my health-related data, I was met with this tricky series dialog boxes

I noticed that most apps on the App Store all seem to want you to create an account. I get that that's how they primarily operate but I'm put off by it.

This might be a controversial opinion but I like that my runs with my Apple Watch are recorded in iOS on-device, without needing to use any of these third-party apps. And if you still want to share or even backup your runs, you can use apps like HealthFit¹ or RunGap² to export FIT files that contain GPS points and heart rate data, or export them directly via API to the service you want. If you _really_ want to DIY, you can write some scripts that extract them from the SQLite files in your iOS backups. But by default, everything is local only and you have the choice to do whatever you want with the data.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healthfit/id1202650514

[2] https://www.rungap.com/

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

There’s also open source apps that can do this (but you have to build them and install using a developer certificate). It’s a shame though exporting workouts to gpx is not possible using the built in apps.

dariosalvi784• 6 years ago

So maybe people now realise they are buying services not devices. These devices are locked, either you share your most intimate data with their companies or they're unusable. Garmin is a bit of an exception here because they at least allow you to get the data via USB.

submeta• 6 years ago

But they are very restrictive with API access. You have to apply for a developer access, and they won't give you any if you aren't a developer.

All the "modern" companies will give you an API access, a token and even API wrapper code in many languages in an instant. Garmin is very old-school here.

dariosalvi784• 6 years ago

Very old school indeed. In my job we tried to approach them. They have a very interesting library that allows your app to connect to their devices and skip their app. It's for research only. They kindly offered us to use it but when we mentioned that our app was open source they pulled the offer. We tried to explain that we could bundle their library in a proprietary module but they didn't want to listen.

On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services

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