Hacker News Reader

Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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 :)

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com