What do the watches support?
The first blog post about this project might have given the impression that the SDM (foot pod) profile was chosen right from the start; however, other options were evaluated along the way.My first thought was to use the Fitness Equipment (FE) profile because, well, it's a treadmill... a piece of fitness equipment. A cursory glance through the specification was looking promising: Elapsed time, distance traveled, and speed. Those were all supported in the profile and all I was looking to provide to the watch. Things were looking good.
The next task at hand was to figure out what ANT+ profiles the watches I have natively support. I have the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music and the Garmin Forerunner 920XT watches for testing. First stop, thisisant.com to view their directory and ANT+ profile support.
Unfortunately, neither watch showed support for the Fitness Equipment profile. Next...
On to the Bike Speed (SPD). At this point I naively thought I could pair my bike's speed sensor to the watch, start pedaling, start a treadmill run on the watch and have it pick up my bike's speed sensor and use it. This didn't happen. When in the treadmill run mode the watch (Vivoactive 3 at the time) didn't use the paired bike sensors. Next...
The last profile that had everything to do with running speed and distance was the Stride-based Speed and Distance Monitoring (SDM) profile and it was supported by both watches. But it did have a potential drawback, it was expecting strides. Of all of the data fields in the specification it's the only required field. This profile has promise and in the next post we'll dig deeper into it and what it was like working with it.
What about ConnectIQ?
Another option was to implement a custom ANT channel and define a custom data profile containing exactly the data I was going to send. The drawback to this approach is that it would require a ConnectIQ app or data field to retrieve the data. This is certainly doable, but ConnectIQ data integration into FIT files still seems clunky and it added another layer of complexity to this project.
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