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m463 2 days ago [-]
Why can't we just connect a garmin watch (or edge or gps) to our ai machine, have it extract all the data with MTP or garmin format, and keep it local. Then ask questions.
Honestly I've been wondering if in the near future I can basically have a big machine and some sort of "ingest" program.
Then keep connect my devices to it, where it will backup all the data, and mine the backups for information I want.
Mine my iphone backups for text messages or contacts
mine all my devices for photos or videos
mine my watch or bike computer or gps or whatever else for where I've been and how I've exercised.
instead, everyone wants your data and imposes themselves in the middle.
NoPicklez 2 minutes ago [-]
You can do this, you can plug your Garmin device into your machine and pull all of the data off.
levocardia 14 hours ago [-]
You can literally connect your Garmin to your computer via USB and drag-and-drop the raw activity files and analyze them if you want. Works totally fine. But Garmin's cloud sync is convenient and cloud processing adds data like elevation (by cross-matching GPS to topo data).
thi2 3 hours ago [-]
This does not work for golf, I tried to get the activity but could not find it.
anygivnthursday 14 hours ago [-]
I used to use Garmin offline like that with GoldenCheetah[0], it was my weekly ritual to analyse progress.
This wouldn't sync over any of the data points that are calculated by the device, VO2 max, various sleeps cores, etc. Probably a good thing as those things are rarely all that useful.
nradov 8 hours ago [-]
All of that data is on the device and can be copied as .FIT files. Some of the fields aren't publicly documented, though.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
That only gives you the activities though, doesn't it? Not the 24/7 metrics the device is also collecting outside of started/stopped activities.
I've been trying to get developer access to my watch, but seems for months the Garmin Developer Program doesn't seem to accept any "requests". The only thing I've seen working, is the full account export, but that takes ~3 days for me from pressing the button until I get the email. Besides that, syncing via Bluetooth and reverse-engineer their own protocol that runs there, seems to be the only way, sadly.
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
Can't you just connect via USB (oldschool method from before their devices even had Bluetooth) and dump the data the old fashioned way ?
howunfortunate 8 hours ago [-]
I work for a company where this is relevant.
Leadership is very aware of this and is accordingly being very careful about how easy we make it for people to instantly offload all of the data they've entered that makes our product worth using vs. a competitor.
I'm not saying this is good, obviously as a consumer I'd like the opposite. All I'm saying is, don't expect companies to be naive about this. If you don't want to be "locked in", you'll likely have to pay for that in some other way.
Centigonal 7 hours ago [-]
Appropriate username!
> If you don't want to be "locked in", you'll likely have to pay for that in some other way.
That "some other way" is almost never via the wallet. From Apple to Whoop to Snowflake to Oracle, the most expensive ecosystems are often the ones with the most lock-in. More often than not, the "some other way" you pay is by having to put up with janky UX and incomplete featuresets.
kyzrfranz 15 hours ago [-]
Main problem is the sync and getting to the data.
Speaking from experience here, been working on something for a while.
This is the current state of the product pitch:
fyi - most of the functionality already working, but the key factor is how to get the data from the vendors.I currently rely on run-gap but i realise this is not a long-term solution.
Last time i have checked intervals icu api I just couldn't stop throwing up for a few days -but this might be better in the mean time.
long term solution is to have something like rungap, server side without the ridiculous fees some of the vendors charge (terra, rook,...)
if anybody wants to test what I currently got, or just has some feedback - let me know.
gadders 14 hours ago [-]
>>without the ridiculous fees some of the vendors charge (terra, rook,...)
They charge an absolute fortune.
cgsmith 2 days ago [-]
This is similar to what I did. Just download the gpx and analyze that. Skips the Garmin API.
zknill 2 days ago [-]
GPS traces recorded on a watch can be pretty noisy. If you stand in the same spot for a while, you're not going to get the exact GPS position recorded for the entire time you're there. The same happens when you move, it's not a smooth trace.
Strava (and I assume to some extent Garmin) apply some smoothing to these raw GPX traces to try and improve the path, or remove some of the noise.
You'd be missing out on this post-processing by taking the data raw. Ofc you can implement something similar yourself, but I wanted to point out that these platforms are doing a little bit more than just displaying the GPX trace.
asp_hornet 14 hours ago [-]
When parsing high end Garmin and Apple fit files, it appears a lot of their smoothing is done before writing to the fit file. They’re in a very workable state straight out of the gate.
TYPE_FASTER 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. The location data you get from CoreLocation has been processed already, in that it is the output of combining the inputs from the GPS, Wi-Fi access points, cell towers, magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors.
Workout data might take it a step further, as you tell it the type of workout, and I'm assuming WorkoutKit might do something like adjust the distance filter that specifies how far the device has to travel before triggering a location update event to minimize battery use during the workout.
szszrk 14 hours ago [-]
But how real of a problem that is?
I wander often on many smartwatch/sport tracking forums/subreddits, and it's fairly frequent that people ask how to deal with smoothing and get back raw data. Some love how Garmin smooths out a race track run for them and make gps trail stick perfectly to a lane. Some pull their hair out seeing their lake run being smoothed out to make it look like they jumped over fences and private properties.
I often find my garmin traces confusing as well, it's not objectively better.
Isn't that how all Garmin GPS devices have traditionally worked ?
exabrial 2 days ago [-]
doesn’t Garmin support completely local synchronization with their devices still?
gadders 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it stays within Garmin. It's hard to get metrics from multiple devices in one place.
m463 2 days ago [-]
they do - and this is why I buy their stuff.
but a lot of these folks are uploading everything to garmin connect and letting it have your data and do the work.
jawilson2 1 days ago [-]
If you do local sync, can you work with the files directly? I.e. if I don't want to upload to garmin connect, can I just tell Claude to use an API or reverse engineer the files? I've had a venu 4 for a few months, and finished my connect+ trial, and want to setup my own analytics.
djantje 15 hours ago [-]
I just connected my Garmin watch to charge via usb, enabled disk access, going into folder GARMIN/Activity/ and uploaded one of the .fit files to claude web and asked a summary and graph, it seems I had a nice evening bike ride that day :)
I highly recommend GadgetBridge for anyone wanting to avoid Garmin's cloud services: https://gadgetbridge.org/
szszrk 14 hours ago [-]
I love it as it supports some weird devices that were abandoned or require Chinese data residency for them to sync.
How is it working for you in Garmin for sleep tracking? I tried it a few years ago and loved it at first, but then noticed how incorrect sleep data was.
shrx 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not using it for sleep tracking so I can't comment on that. I mostly use it with Garmin Instinct 3 Solar for recording and exporting gpx tracks of my hikes and bicycle trips.
lukwoz 13 hours ago [-]
At the moment I'm a happy user of Tredict (https://www.tredict.com/app/). It sits between Garmin Connect and my ChatGPT (they have a ChatGPT connector). Works just great for the training data - in seconds after finishing my training, it's also visible to my ChatGPT, with all the details like intervals, heart rate etc. It's a paid tool, but they offer a 2-month free trial so it's easy to validate for a given use case (and get dependent on it too. :) ).
No, I'm not affiliated with Tredict :) (but if you guys are reading it, good job)
Aldipower 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah and overall it is a mature platform for endurance sport planning.
Lhd 13 hours ago [-]
Which "Using an unofficial Garmin MCP" were you using? and which problems you encountered that made you move on?
I've been using taxuspt/garmin_mcp[0] via claude desktop and recommend it. It reads my data and it is able to create and schedule workouts. I've decided to fork it because it was not able to create the type of workouts that i wanted (swim, bike, run and gym) and it also pushes into my garmin calendar which syncs directly to the watch/gps unit).
Claude's official strava connector[1] is able to read the data (garmin -> strava -> claude), yes. But my point of view for strava is that it's not really meant to be for workouts - it's a social media to give/receive kudos and see what your friends and 'influencers' are doing (i'm not really interested). All the metrics of cadence/vertical oscilation/sleep, for example, are not synced to strava and therefore not accessible.
I've recently done something simliar but for creating strength workouts via Claude.
The web and mobile based workout builder has a terrible UI if your workout changes between sessions so I've lifted some features from an app called liftosaur and got it to send activities to my watch. Unfortunately Garmin don't seem to care very much about strength training, so are missing a lot of pretty key exercises from their list, with no ability to create custom ones
hummuscience 14 hours ago [-]
I am very happy with liftosaur and it's MCP for that!
Strongbad536 10 hours ago [-]
Good stuff - i made one too that can deploy on cloudflare workers, originally based on garmin-givemydata:
- Syncs Garmin every 30 min into a database, so you don't hit garmin's API but rather my own
- Week/month trends for HRV, resting HR, sleep, training readiness, race predictions
- A "how am I today" brief: last night's sleep, HRV vs baseline, readiness, recent load
- Read-only SQL for the weird questions, like "does less sleep hurt my runs?"
> Imagine how great an Instagram MCP would be. You could create your own feed algorithm (such as the OG algorithm: just pictures from friends based on when they posted). Users would be able to filter out all the influencer content and ads Instagram throws on them. But Instagram would never do this.
This is why I don't understand why MCPs (or in other words open documented APIs right?) are being pushed so much.
What's the value in e.g. Amazon opening up their APIs to competitors, lowering the cost of scraping their data? Or allowing their consumers to more easily analyze dynamic pricing? Isn't the whole point to steer people towards closed proprietary apps that work in walled garden that prevent reverse-engineering and any kind of modification?
weird-eye-issue 15 hours ago [-]
> e.g. Amazon opening up their APIs to competitors, lowering the cost of scraping their data?
Not a great example considering how easy it is to get Amazon data from both official and unofficial APIs (which is very cheap at scale)
vaultdweller101 7 hours ago [-]
I created a Garmin CLI that just connects to Garmin Connect. My agent loves it. Now it is my coach which I anthropomorphize too much, but it has a lasting effect in the sense of keeping running. I also feel relieved to not use the awful iOS app or website anymore.
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
You mean it connects to the "Garmin Connect" app on the watch ? What protocol / what device are you running it on ?
Also sounds like a great candidate for backing up (automatically) your Garmin data locally !
schwetim 7 hours ago [-]
I would love to try your CLI
helsinkiandrew 13 hours ago [-]
Claude (Opus5.5Medium) with "Claude in Chrome" can scan your activities in Strava and Garmin Connect websites and download GPX files without use of an MCP (perhaps not as quick).
I've found it can also give quite good suggestions for what kind of run to do after looking at my previous weeks activities on the Strava website.
TrueGeek 15 hours ago [-]
I've been using the unofficial Garmin APIs as well, but instead of an MCP I wrote an app that waits until my watch syncs after I wake up and then grabs all of yesterdays data and puts it into a Notion db.
It's been working great. The Claude morning brief compares my sleep, HRV, training status, calendar, and weather and then tells me when and how hard to workout that day.
lairv 14 hours ago [-]
I would like the reverse of an MCP, a protocol so that everyday apps can push notify (given my authorization) my agents on specific events
For example after I complete a run on Strava I want my agents to know about it, they already have all the context, they know what weekly volume I'm aiming for and what I'm training for
weird-eye-issue 11 hours ago [-]
That's not a reverse MCP, they are working on adding that sort of thing into MCP. In the meantime just run scheduled tasks or webhooks to pull data
jordiori 13 hours ago [-]
I've created a "running coach" agent that does something similar. It basically exports Garmin's data using the unofficial API into a sqlite db. Then, the agent has some tools to query the data directly in the database with SQL. It works pretty well.
weird-eye-issue 15 hours ago [-]
I sync Garmin activities to Strava then use the Strava API in Claude Code. Although I think Strava just came out with an MCP. This works great but doesn't access things like sleep which I didn't need anyways
Its funny because I literally just used it, opened HN, then saw this post
methou 13 hours ago [-]
There’s an unofficial Garmin connect Home Assistant extension, playing along with Prometheus exporter you can get a quite impressive dashboard. That’s what I did.
ssgodderidge 14 hours ago [-]
The approach is more agent skills + a CLI that hits publicly available APIs than an MCP, but still cool! I would love to see the code?
citruscomputing 7 hours ago [-]
I wanted similar for my Oura ring, but all the MCP servers were unmaintained. Claude suggested a SQLite db with cron sync, built it, and it works pretty great. An MCP server would've been overkill, and slower probably too. Only downside so far is the Oura API doesn't expose some metrics I care about, like cumulative stress.
Currently experimenting with prompt-injecting my sleep score etc with a startup hook, so agents automatically give simpler responses when I'm not "all there." (Also using this data to make it suggest less complicated/demanding perfume samples to try on those days.) Curious if anyone else has cool use cases for feeding health data to the AI overlords.
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
Have they published any data how they even calculate the "cumulative stress" metrics ? I would guess it's fairly straight forward
kyzrfranz 10 hours ago [-]
took it live, if you want to have a look if it works for you - go ahead :)
-> www.fitsel.app
I have been experimenting with using run-gap paid and my own agregation / mcp for a little over a year, and for me and my coach it works great.
You'll get to dive into the numbers the way you prefer either via api or using any LLM which offers some new ways of looking at your data.
And the whole thing is liberated from vendor specific interpretation.
but thats just me, be curious to get some more thoughts on it.
obilgic 15 hours ago [-]
Just connect your garmin to intervals.icu
rcMgD2BwE72F 14 hours ago [-]
Just connect your Garmin to GadgetBridge as and have a small script upload your files to intervals.icu. Your data will never touch a Garmin server.
This works perfectly for me. Couldn't be happier.
faangguyindia 14 hours ago [-]
Many people actually try to use Garmin or other trackers/smart watches for things they aren't good at.
For example, if you want to track your maintenance calories (TDEE, total daily expenditure), Garmin isn't going to be much useful.
jcul 14 hours ago [-]
I've started exporting my sleep data from Garmin connect. And my expenditure, weight, nutrition, from macrofactor.
I add them to a spreadsheet along with other metrics I've been collecting manually for a long time, like tape, caliper measurements etc.
I do it weekly and then ask Claude to analyse the sheet.
It's super manual but just once a week and it can be really helpful / spots insights I often miss like how sleep affected something etc.
faangguyindia 14 hours ago [-]
We use a neural network to predict maintenance calories.
We actually operate a MacroFactor competitor: MacroCodex (which is completely free).
https://macrocodex.app/ we've like 17,000+ users so far.
It adapts much faster than MacroFactor, and it's completely free of subscriptions and ads.
Guaranteed weight gain or loss within 2-3 weeks, consider reading reviews if in doubt, many people will see results from the very first week on macrocodex!
Many people waste their time by adding "calorie burn" from different activities by tracking all of them individually in smartwatches or fitness bands.
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
Do maintenance calories vary and change that much (excluding exercise variance) ?
faangguyindia 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, it can vary by 200-300kcal on week to week basis on average
iamacyborg 13 hours ago [-]
> For example, if you want to track your maintenance calories (TDEE, total daily expenditure), Garmin isn't going to be much useful.
Why not?
faangguyindia 11 hours ago [-]
It's not accurate for this.
You can't use a sensor and stack calorie burn from bunch of activities and add them all up to workout maintenance calories.
You can see the reviews and guaranteed results within 2-3 weeks, all for free.
khaki54 7 hours ago [-]
I want this for the scuba version of the watch and frankly also the dog stuff too. I looked and yeah the ecosystem isn't very welcoming to integrate or build with.
The idea of letting an LLM anywhere near my finances (and actually initiate transactions) terrifies me. And I like using LLMs.
andor 9 hours ago [-]
Paying bills of the same 3 companies each week is also not something that requires a LLM. In other countries, it would simply be a direct debit transaction or a scheduled bank transfer.
leni536 8 hours ago [-]
To be fair, direct debit also terrifies me. But I use that one.
Hamuko 14 hours ago [-]
I'm more terrified about how much (personal) data people are feeding commercial LLMs. You send Claude your Garmin data and Anthropic will keep it for literally years. And then probably hand it over to law enforcement as soon as a subpoena hits.
I've been using a local LLM (Gemma) to tag my personal documents (invoices, receipts, etc.) and there's no way I'd ever send that data to Anthropic or OpenAI.
weird-eye-issue 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's a tradeoff... I had Claude Code discover issues my CPA made that resulted in getting over $100k back in my taxes after they amended and fixed my returns. But I had to feed in a ton of personal information for that to work
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
Now you gotta tell us what the trick was !
weird-eye-issue 1 hours ago [-]
It wasn't a trick, it was just pretty standard stuff in my situation that they completely forgot to take advantage of like deductions related to living outside of the US and related to some previous year losses on a rental property that was sold that they completely forgot to deduct when it was sold you can claim those losses back. It swung the tax return I just filed from owing 30k to getting 30k back, plus they filed amendments for the last couple years to get some money back there as well totaling around 100k
Honestly I've been wondering if in the near future I can basically have a big machine and some sort of "ingest" program.
Then keep connect my devices to it, where it will backup all the data, and mine the backups for information I want.
Mine my iphone backups for text messages or contacts
mine all my devices for photos or videos
mine my watch or bike computer or gps or whatever else for where I've been and how I've exercised.
instead, everyone wants your data and imposes themselves in the middle.
[0]: https://www.goldencheetah.org/
I've been trying to get developer access to my watch, but seems for months the Garmin Developer Program doesn't seem to accept any "requests". The only thing I've seen working, is the full account export, but that takes ~3 days for me from pressing the button until I get the email. Besides that, syncing via Bluetooth and reverse-engineer their own protocol that runs there, seems to be the only way, sadly.
Leadership is very aware of this and is accordingly being very careful about how easy we make it for people to instantly offload all of the data they've entered that makes our product worth using vs. a competitor.
I'm not saying this is good, obviously as a consumer I'd like the opposite. All I'm saying is, don't expect companies to be naive about this. If you don't want to be "locked in", you'll likely have to pay for that in some other way.
> If you don't want to be "locked in", you'll likely have to pay for that in some other way.
That "some other way" is almost never via the wallet. From Apple to Whoop to Snowflake to Oracle, the most expensive ecosystems are often the ones with the most lock-in. More often than not, the "some other way" you pay is by having to put up with janky UX and incomplete featuresets.
https://claude.ai/artifact/162zJUVejDdrAAw6yz9ETs
fyi - most of the functionality already working, but the key factor is how to get the data from the vendors.I currently rely on run-gap but i realise this is not a long-term solution. Last time i have checked intervals icu api I just couldn't stop throwing up for a few days -but this might be better in the mean time.
long term solution is to have something like rungap, server side without the ridiculous fees some of the vendors charge (terra, rook,...)
if anybody wants to test what I currently got, or just has some feedback - let me know.
They charge an absolute fortune.
Strava (and I assume to some extent Garmin) apply some smoothing to these raw GPX traces to try and improve the path, or remove some of the noise.
You'd be missing out on this post-processing by taking the data raw. Ofc you can implement something similar yourself, but I wanted to point out that these platforms are doing a little bit more than just displaying the GPX trace.
Workout data might take it a step further, as you tell it the type of workout, and I'm assuming WorkoutKit might do something like adjust the distance filter that specifies how far the device has to travel before triggering a location update event to minimize battery use during the workout.
I wander often on many smartwatch/sport tracking forums/subreddits, and it's fairly frequent that people ask how to deal with smoothing and get back raw data. Some love how Garmin smooths out a race track run for them and make gps trail stick perfectly to a lane. Some pull their hair out seeing their lake run being smoothed out to make it look like they jumped over fences and private properties.
I often find my garmin traces confusing as well, it's not objectively better.
Interesting article (which I think is relevant)
but a lot of these folks are uploading everything to garmin connect and letting it have your data and do the work.
How is it working for you in Garmin for sleep tracking? I tried it a few years ago and loved it at first, but then noticed how incorrect sleep data was.
No, I'm not affiliated with Tredict :) (but if you guys are reading it, good job)
I've been using taxuspt/garmin_mcp[0] via claude desktop and recommend it. It reads my data and it is able to create and schedule workouts. I've decided to fork it because it was not able to create the type of workouts that i wanted (swim, bike, run and gym) and it also pushes into my garmin calendar which syncs directly to the watch/gps unit).
Claude's official strava connector[1] is able to read the data (garmin -> strava -> claude), yes. But my point of view for strava is that it's not really meant to be for workouts - it's a social media to give/receive kudos and see what your friends and 'influencers' are doing (i'm not really interested). All the metrics of cadence/vertical oscilation/sleep, for example, are not synced to strava and therefore not accessible.
[0]: https://github.com/taxuspt/garmin_mcp [1]: https://claude.com/marketplace/connectors/strava
The web and mobile based workout builder has a terrible UI if your workout changes between sessions so I've lifted some features from an app called liftosaur and got it to send activities to my watch. Unfortunately Garmin don't seem to care very much about strength training, so are missing a lot of pretty key exercises from their list, with no ability to create custom ones
- Syncs Garmin every 30 min into a database, so you don't hit garmin's API but rather my own
- Week/month trends for HRV, resting HR, sleep, training readiness, race predictions
- A "how am I today" brief: last night's sleep, HRV vs baseline, readiness, recent load
- Read-only SQL for the weird questions, like "does less sleep hurt my runs?"
My agents use it for daily briefs to me and when i ask about random health/exercise stuff - https://github.com/BrianVia/garmin-mcp-cloudflare-workers
See also: the OG App : https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-...
This is why I don't understand why MCPs (or in other words open documented APIs right?) are being pushed so much.
What's the value in e.g. Amazon opening up their APIs to competitors, lowering the cost of scraping their data? Or allowing their consumers to more easily analyze dynamic pricing? Isn't the whole point to steer people towards closed proprietary apps that work in walled garden that prevent reverse-engineering and any kind of modification?
Not a great example considering how easy it is to get Amazon data from both official and unofficial APIs (which is very cheap at scale)
Also sounds like a great candidate for backing up (automatically) your Garmin data locally !
I've found it can also give quite good suggestions for what kind of run to do after looking at my previous weeks activities on the Strava website.
It's been working great. The Claude morning brief compares my sleep, HRV, training status, calendar, and weather and then tells me when and how hard to workout that day.
For example after I complete a run on Strava I want my agents to know about it, they already have all the context, they know what weekly volume I'm aiming for and what I'm training for
Its funny because I literally just used it, opened HN, then saw this post
Currently experimenting with prompt-injecting my sleep score etc with a startup hook, so agents automatically give simpler responses when I'm not "all there." (Also using this data to make it suggest less complicated/demanding perfume samples to try on those days.) Curious if anyone else has cool use cases for feeding health data to the AI overlords.
-> www.fitsel.app
I have been experimenting with using run-gap paid and my own agregation / mcp for a little over a year, and for me and my coach it works great. You'll get to dive into the numbers the way you prefer either via api or using any LLM which offers some new ways of looking at your data. And the whole thing is liberated from vendor specific interpretation. but thats just me, be curious to get some more thoughts on it.
This works perfectly for me. Couldn't be happier.
For example, if you want to track your maintenance calories (TDEE, total daily expenditure), Garmin isn't going to be much useful.
I add them to a spreadsheet along with other metrics I've been collecting manually for a long time, like tape, caliper measurements etc.
I do it weekly and then ask Claude to analyse the sheet.
It's super manual but just once a week and it can be really helpful / spots insights I often miss like how sleep affected something etc.
We actually operate a MacroFactor competitor: MacroCodex (which is completely free). https://macrocodex.app/ we've like 17,000+ users so far.
It adapts much faster than MacroFactor, and it's completely free of subscriptions and ads.
Guaranteed weight gain or loss within 2-3 weeks, consider reading reviews if in doubt, many people will see results from the very first week on macrocodex!
Many people waste their time by adding "calorie burn" from different activities by tracking all of them individually in smartwatches or fitness bands.
Why not?
You can't use a sensor and stack calorie burn from bunch of activities and add them all up to workout maintenance calories.
The sensorless method we use is more reliable, https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
You can see the reviews and guaranteed results within 2-3 weeks, all for free.
https://coros.com/stories/coros-metrics/c/mcp-testing
https://github.com/CodeWithCJ/SparkyFitness
I've been using a local LLM (Gemma) to tag my personal documents (invoices, receipts, etc.) and there's no way I'd ever send that data to Anthropic or OpenAI.