Discussion: Garmin transfer

Some of you have a new feature activated on your accounts, direct transfer and track storage from Forerunners. Look for it on the add-training form.

This is coming soon to more people, so please don't beg for it yet. You can email me directly or post here if you have issues.

(on rare occasions, I have seen the Garmin Communicator plugin lock up browsers, so if you get totally frozen up you may need to kill the browser exe)

Just saw it and used it. Awesome feature. Thanks Ken!

Ken, you just keep making this site better and better. What a great feature! That link on Boris' training is simply awesome.

Be aware you need to load the site as www.attackpoint.org, not attackpoint.org - otherwise you seem to get the error that 'The plug-in was not unlocked successfully.'

I've been waiting for this feature ever since it first showed up on Ken's log. I even used my new 305 for the first time yesterday. It's as if I knew.

Thanks!!

Very cool feature Ken - a quick question though I think I know the answers:

Any way to upload from non-forerunner type garmin devices via standard gpx files? I'm running a 60CSX unit. I don't have a problem doing a two-step - download gpx to computer, then upload to attackpoint if a gpx importer is available.

Anyway to circumvent the need for the communicator plugin? I'm running Linux and Garmin caters to MAC/PC only.

Just figured I'd ask...

Clint, not yet. But there will be more upload methods available in the future, e.g. via SportTracks (sooner) and GPX file (later). GPX will definitely happen since it is important for all the non-garmin devices, especially the display-less dataloggers we're going to see more of.

Also the attackpoint.org problem feet mentions should be fixed now.

Speed graph is a bit strange. Longer smoohing gives a lot better speed curve. There may be something.

(If/when gpx happens I'd love to be able to not only upload file but also be able to give just url and let AP to load the gpx from there. Possibly give permanet url as profile settings or something. like that one could use tools to get gpx data somwhere automagically without having to import export save and select file by hand. Like using bat with gpsbabel command to download data from logger device to computer and then ftp command to uplaod it immediately to server to be loaded by AP at the add training page. Or using live tracking, so gpx data would already be there available when session ends.)

Is it possible to extricate the data from the log TO a GPX file for use elsewhere, or will SportTrack type process still be required.

It is indeed cool. I particularly like that all the splits are displayed on the map at the same time. I don’t think this can be done using the gramin application that comes with the 305. Nor can it be done on garmin connect.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Wish I had access! Ken- I’m wishing, not asking :-)

Bernie - here's the magic wishing link :-)

Thats amazing! Thanks for sharing this. I'm using it right away. But dont tell too many people. This is a powerful link. We would not want it to get into nefarious hands.

Guys, as always, your contributions are appreciated. But please do not [yet] donate with the expectation that you will get immediate access to this feature. We are still a few weeks away from that...I need to make sure things are running smoothly before opening it up.

George, I haven't gotten to this yet, but there should eventually be at least GPX and KML (google earth) export ability for stored tracks.

Nice - just a suggestion. Can easily wait. What it does so far is magic to this computer klutz.

Thanks for this new feature Ken. Are we able to choose if our distance is displayed on our log as miles or kilometers?

Yeah, just change the distance-units dropdown box before or after you import. the imported distance value should get converted automagically. (as of just now this also works on the "edit" session page)

Well then, the wishing link is a good place donate and just wish. Nothing wrong with that.

Yay! FINALLY the perfect excuse for the PERFECT Christmas gift ... for me. :)

A great opportunity for a little holiday gift for Attackpoint too! Sorry if I didn't read this thread before donating and begging Ken. ;)

I've been using gmaps-pedometer combined with excel (yes, excel, argh!) to get interesting runs up on the site, which I'm getting pretty good at, but it can still take a fair chunk of time, and I'm always suspect of my ability to get good distances out of gmaps-pedometer.

Huzzah!

Ken- How are the HR zones adjusted? Can go it in TC but not in Sporttrack or AP.

for 305s, AP reads it from the watch and gets the zones you set via Garmin Training Center (or the defaults). for 405s and 310s that doesn't work, so there will soon be a way to configure your zones via AP.

in SportTracks, look for Other Tasks > Select view > Categories > Heart Rate Zones

Ken, thanks for the HR zones add-in for the 405. I used it tonight. It noted that 4 seconds did not fit into any zone (my 0 HR zone does not start at 0 bpm; maybe I should change that for those occasional weird Garmin readings). But it also got the total time wrong (off by 1 minute) for that one event (the other two were right on). Not a big problem.
Edit: I think the missed time was due to wacky HR data. It was the start of my run, maybe the strap connection wasn't good or wet enough?

I guess ken knows this already, but anyway: Google map route viewer thing does't work at the moment if one uses http://www.ar.attackpoint.org or http://www.trainingpulse.com

This is almost certainly the same error as the one I found (since fixed) for attackpoint.org vs. www.attackpoint.org: the plugin is associated with a specific URL.

Just joined AP (have been using other services and Sports Tracker previously). Is the SportsTracker / Forerunner/ GPX feature activated yet in AP? Couldn't find it in the "add training" form..perhaps it's only active for pilot user accounts?

Hi Helifeikki, nice to see you here. It's still available only in limited beta for a subset of users.

I wrote a little phone app (tweaked RG tracking app used at Yökuppi) to log workout as gps logger and send data to AP. About like with garmin but AP posting is done directly from phone right after workout. See video at my log. Let me know if you have beta tester privileges and you have s60 Nokia and you like to try.

Hello Ken,
I would realy like to use this feature, but I can't find it.
Best regards from Holland

Jarkko, do you think it would work with the Nokia 5800? (Some s60 programs, like Nokia's sportstracker) do but others seem not to.

I hope it does. It works on N97 so it should work on 5800 too, but you never know without trying. I can't find your email address, just send me email, I'll reply some install instructions.

Actually one does not need to be beta tester of this feature to try the phone app. Time, distance and comments will be posted to AP just fine, but without gps track.

Hi Jagge, any idea when this feature will be available to everyone?

You mean Garmin transfer? How could I know. Ken only knows, of course. My wild guess is it will be available to donated users at AP's 10th birthday. And never to everyone.

Not a bad guess. I have been aiming for sometime before the end of this month.

I've only just managed to find a computer that installs the Garmin transfer software and I quite like the map data downloads. It gives me something to aim for with splits info too. Thanks Ken!

Now I just need to get enthused about using the HR monitor on the Garmin, something I've never been interested in before.

I am eagerly awaiting the update to be able to upload my Garmin data to Attackpoint. I think that the work that is being done on Attackpoint is excellent and this functionality will surely make it an even better service for us orienteering junkies. Thanks in advance!

Just got my 305, and am excited toooo!

I guess it doesn't work with my old foretrex 201 - time to think about an upgrade.

Ken wrote: "on rare occasions, I have seen the Garmin Communicator plugin lock up browsers, so if you get totally frozen up you may need to kill the browser exe". This has happened to me on Firefox all of the last 5+ times I've tried this over the past week. I wonder if I have some funky data it can't handle? SportTracks is doing fine. I know I should reboot before complaining much, but this was working so nicely for while...

On a more productive comment, is there a way to set the HR zones, or does AP pick those automatically?

It just worked. 3rd try this evening.
For reference, 1st try got to 40%.
Then I rebooted the Garmin & unplugged my Blackberry (which was for some reason getting asked for the password when the Garmin sync began) before the 2nd try, which got to 98%.
Then I tried again without doing anything extra, and it worked. Go figure.

(taskmgr-killing of firefox.exe between each try...)

The only time anything has gone wrong for me was when I knocked the garmin out of the cradle during transfer - reckon I can take the blame for that one :)
Set your HR zones on your watch / in garmin training centre / whatever you use - attackpoint uses the same zones you set there (I'm pretty sure)

Mike, don't throw away the Foretrex 201 yet (unless you were looking for an excuse to ;-) I'm close to having that working also. I happen to have one of those. This probably means many older serial-port garmins will be directly supported to some extent. for others there will eventually be GPX import.

Wyatt, from my experience it seems to be some combination of the states of your forerunner and PC, though pretty unpredictable. certainly if you have old tracks on there that are already downloaded everywhere you want them, it can help to delete them (try History > Running > Delete > Keep 1 month). about a year ago it was happening to me as often as you describe. As you know it's quite a pain. that made development sort of hard too.

Sporttracks doesn't have this problem because it's not using Garmin's browser plugin, it just talks to 305s via USB. Hopefully Garmin will fix it in a future plugin release, I have seen others complaining in the Garmin forums. it is also worth checking whether you have the latest 305 firmware and plugin available. Your other option is to download to ST and then export using the ST2AP plugin.

FYI, this feature is now available for all current donors (i.e. if you've donated the suggested amount in the last year). You can expect continuing improvements, in particular for the track view which is still a bit raw. As always, please report any issues.

I would also be interested to hear about success/failure using this with any unusual or older Garmins. It should work with most of them.

Direct GPX upload is still planned. It's worth mentioning that one way to get that now is to load the file in SportTracks and then export via the plugin.

Looking forward to the GPX upload as I'm on a Linux system so don't have access to Sporttracks or the garmin browser plug-in.

please report any issues ... :) well, i use to import my trainings into sporttracks and edit them as necessary and upload them via the ap plugin to ap. this works great but the gps doesnt work properly. if i choose the garmin plugin to add the training the gps works fine.

it would be nice if it would also work if i export it from sporttracks.

I love it! Works like a charm, and especially the batch upload was a nice feature.

Keep the good work up! Regards from Sweden!

Works great from SportTracks for me! YAY KEN! Best bang-for-buck on the web. Yet to try straight from the 305, but I'm guessing it will be just as simple and straightforward as SportTracks.

naomi: Do you have the latest SportTracks plugin, as ken mentions?

had email contact with ken and i found out i had an older version ... now it works fine which means i am happy!

thx ken!!

Just great, thanks ken!

If I compare it to Garmin Connect I prefere the way AP handles the data. Some features (getting HR/speed information by pointing along the route, autosplits and the HR distribution graph) are things the GC website lacks.

It's incredible what an (almost free) website does what a multi million company website doesn't!

Hey ken:

I'm having some HR oddities, which I'm sure you can explain/help me fix. Basically they are what seems to be a mismatch between HR data on the watch and in AP. I think my HR zones are the same on my 305 and AP (of course except that there's no zone 0 on watch).

Watch:
1 = 112 132
2 = 133 143
3 = 144 160
4 = 161 171
5 = 172 255

AP:
0 = 0 111
rest are the same as above

SportTracks lines up properly, but direct from the Garmin seems to be off by about (but not exactly) a HR zone too high? If you look at my training from today, you'll see my warmup/downs, the average HR is 136 & 138 for each, which is squarely in the middle of zone 2 ... but it all shows up as zone 3.

What have I fumbled? Any more info I can give?

In the 'greedy users want more' category: any way to get numbers on the axes of the graph in the top left corner of what you get when you click on the globe icon? This is still one thing Garmin does better than Attackpoint. (The map is, obviously, much nicer under Google / Attackpoint than on Garmin's version.)

Hugh, for the 305 AP should read and use the zones that are set in the watch. if I remember correctly it is possible to update your zones in GTC but not sync them to the watch, or maybe something else weird is going on. Starting now AP will also record the zones it is using for each session, so after your next transfer (new session or re-download of old session) we can look closer and see what is going on.

feet: Yes, this is coming. In general you can expect a lot of improvements for this view, it is my current priority.

Also, it's kind of buried but maybe some of you noticed the OpenOrienteeringMap types available in the track view. Pick OSM first, then the OOM styles from the dropdown.

Big thanks to Ollie for OOM and letting us load the tiles from his server. Now everyone make some map updates! :)

Ken: I re-uploaded one run (the one that says 'test' in the notes from yesterday), for your enjoyment. I haven't been using GTC, just SportTracks or straight to AP, now that it's so awesome. I manually set the HR Zones in my watch in the Settings > Running > HR Zones. I'll try a GTC sync now and do another upload test after that and see if it makes a difference!

Thanks for the tips.

The OOM is cool!

Drat, no dice (test2 w/GTC). I even tried making my max (in zone 5) the same as my profile max ... hmm. Note graph in GTC for that session lines up with my HR data everywhere. I even did this all on a different PC, just in case that might be an issue:



Let me know if I can provide further details. This is not urgent, I know my zones and it's more important that I train in them than see them all pretty on AttackPoint. Although that's mighty fun too!

Thanks Ken - I started dumping stuff straight into Attackpoint about 1 day after first trying to do things with GTC and Sportstracks. I don't bother with either of them - get everything I could possibly want without the potential to waste even more hours of my life overanalysing things from the direct transfer. I love it.

Ken: suddenly things are working! I don't know if you fiddled with anything on your end or what, but my upload today (2/7) was spot on! In fact, I prefer the direct upload vs. the SportTracks for several reasons: 1 - skipping the extra step, 2 - the main one being the HR zones on ST insist that the end of one zone is the same as the start of the next zone, which seems odd.

So there you go, thanks if you did something, etc. I LOVE the product!

I did fix something minor, but it looks like your zones are also different from your last test upload. did you by any chance switch the sport mode of your 305 today? e.g. from Running to Other? the 305 stores a set of zones for each sport mode.

Nope, I didn't do anything that I'm aware of, just went for a ski (in Running mode :)). And I presume if I'd switched to Other or whatever it would be some default values that I never use, and would be even more screwy?

Well, as long as it's working, I'm happy! I'll let you know if I notice anything else strange after tomorrow's run. Thanks for the consideration!

Just found a way to directly upload Garmin data using Firefox under Linux. There is a Garmin Communicator Plugin for Linux / Ubuntu here.
Works just fine for my FR305 and Ubuntu 9.04.

I have a Polar HRM and a separate GPX file. Is there any way to combine the HRM data with the GPX file and be able to upload the combined file into Attackpoint? A file format would probably be enough and I can massage the GPX and HRM data myself if there is nothing currently available.

Greig, please let me know if you get a satisfactory answer to your question—I have the exact same needs (and some Python skills).

Sportracks should be able to merge GPX and hr data for you, I did it last year for some WREs. You basically import both files and on the second it gives you the option to update the existing entry. You might need a plugin to read Polar files, and you might need to play with import options or manually trim your GPX file if the start times are different. Then you can export to AP via plugin or TCX.

Thanks, I'll give that a go.

I managed to import data via Sportstracks but it was a bit of work to get it all working.

The steps I took were download Sportstracks 3 and then get the plugin for ST3 from http://st2ap.codeplex.com/releases/view/53493

Then follow the plugin instructions to get it working with Sportstracks.

Once all that was done I imported my HRM file which Sportstracks seemed happy to do. After that I imported the GPX file, Sportstracks then asked if I wanted to add this to the existing training session which I chose to do. Then using the export option I was able to upload the info to Attackpoint.

I suspect there might be a nicer way where I just run a script that takes the GPX and HRM file, extracts the relevant info and reformats it into the TCX format then I can just import that into Attackpoint.

Ken: What parts of the TCX format do you currently import? Do you have an example test file that you use for testing your import code? Is it possible to view this file to ensure I get my file correct?

Attackpoint also supports HR in GPX files using a Garmin schema extension. That should be much easier to create if you want to put together your own script. it looks like this:

...
<trkpt lat="39.3456" lon="-77.1234">
<ele>148.1804199</ele>
<time>2010-03-05T18:32:52Z</time>
<extensions>
<TrackPointExtension>
<hr>72</hr>
</TrackPointExtension>
</extensions>
</trkpt>
...

Strictly speaking, there should be xml namespace prefixes on the
TrackPointExtension and hr elements, but AP ignores them anyway. I will email you a whole example file.

@danf: It works for me when I switch the user agent to "Firefox 3.6.6 (Win XP)" using the User Agent Switcher. With the default user agent, the Garmin Communicator popup is blank and nothing happens. I find that I need to reload the "Add Training" page after switching the user agent in order for the Garmin Communicator to work. This is with a FR305.

@danf: arthurd is correct. The plugin's webpage says it is no longer necessary to change the user agent. But in fact I still have to. This is with Ubuntu 10.04, Firefox 3.6.15 and communicator plugin 0.2.8.

I just changed something on the AP side that may eliminate the need to switch user-agents, but I don't currently have a way to test it. Let me know if it works.

(bonus: the mac plugin might now also work in Chrome)

I still had to switch the user agent to upload tonight.
(Kubuntu 8.something, Firefox 3.6.16, Communicator plugin 0.3.0)

No worries, though - I'm thrilled upload works so easily from Linux. :)

It works for me without user agent switching now. Thanks Ken.

It also now works for me without user agent switching. Maybe something more needed to be reset than what I tried last time. In any case, very nice!

Hi, sorry can't find the answer to this but guess it's something to do with garmin communicator plug in. got a new 310xt, finally managed to get things downloaded to garmin connect but when I try to do garmin transfer on AP it doesn't find the new data. Can anyone point me in the right direction??

somewhere between updating the plugin, deleting my old device and repairing a number of times it worked. Happy to not have to upload 3 weeks of gpx files!!

I was in Manly recently.

Nice! I ran away to tassie.

umm, I know it's boring but i'm just getting "no device found" again. Anyone got any bright ideas?

One option that should always work (assuming it is not a sync problem) is just to bypass the Garmin plugin and pick the new FIT files from your PC's sync folder.

folder for ANT Agent:
https://support.garmin.com/support/searchSupport/c...

folder for Express:
http://support.garmin.com/support/searchSupport/ca...

Thanks ken, I'll try that.