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Tanita BC-590BT v. BC-1000

I have a tanita scale that is some years old... has body fat etc and I use it all the time.
When i bought it I wished it had bluetooth so I could have a live chart of values on the PC or online. That wasn't an option.
Now I'm into this garmin world. It led me to the BC-1000. Awesome.. so exciting.. checked it all out.. BUT... while I'm glad it seems tanita is seeing the vision here, it looks like some gross miscalculations have been made in delivery. Some serious weaknesses with the project:
1 - ANT v. bluetooth. I'm not too familiar with the garmin/'industry' ANT protocol, but it seems silly for this app. Your scale is at home.. with your PC. You aren't riding around with it. You aren't wearing your garmin watch while you are on it. The scale should talk bluetooth. My PC/MAC already has bluetooth. It sure has *** doesnt have any ANY driver. I don't want any more dongles...
2 - NO DISPLAY!!! ha.. seriously! what an oversight! a scale that doesn't have a display. I saw something about people not seeing the weight on it. Who is hanging out in your bathroom looking over your (naked) shoulder? This is bizarre. If your wife/husband can't see your weight a) you need relationship help and b) what is keeping them from seeing it on this online account you are trying to upload it to?? So there is this ancillary ANT display you can have elsewhere in the bathroom - very silly. Plus it isn't available yet. PLUS no word on if it can work alongside the watch/pc-dongle display.

ok so a ton of shortcomings. Should be bluetooth, have a display, and send stuff to the PC like mad. WOAH that's been out for months apparently! BC-590BT! Awesome.. just like my old scale but bluetooth. Great news.
SO.
How do I get the data from that scale (or from the PC app recording it) into garmin connect every day? Perhaps it just needs an app to delimit it in the proper fields, save it with the proper name, and write it to my EDGE 605 every time I connect so it will upload it? Any ideas?

0 t_smit over 15 years ago

For some reason I ended up with a Tanita scale in my office, so I figured I'd try it out:
-Set the scale on the floor.
-Grab my FR-60 watch. Go to the settings/system menu, and enabled the scale, then pressed and and held the LIGHT button. Watch says "Scanning".
- After about 3 seconds it says "Scale found" and sure enough, the green light on the scale is flashing. Step on the scale.
- The scale does whatever it needs to do, and then the watch shows me my weight, body fat percentage, and water percentage.
- After I get off the scale, the 'transferring' message on the watch comes up, as it's transferring my weight data to the ANT+ agent on the PC.

The idea of a personal scale without a local display is maybe a little strange, but if you put it in the context of a public gym it might put some people more at ease. In this case, the person uses their watch to receive, display, and store the data, and then when they get home it transfers the data to their PC for trend analysis or uploading to their MD or Garmin Connect. If stepping on the scale is part of your regular workout then quite likely you'd have your monitoring watch with you or nearby.

The Bluetooth vs ANT thing comes down on the side of ANT because watches can easily support an ANT transceiver with just a button cell battery, while Bluetooth transceivers typically require enough battery and CPU horsepower to make a rechargeable battery necessary.

There are always different scenarios where a particular combination of attributes doesn't make sense but I don't think the premise behind this product is too far-fetched.

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

If ANT+ works as described..

It's better than BlueTooth for this application.

No readout on the scale? I can drum up some reason's why this might make sense.. like privacy as mentioned... but more likely... its a business deal between Garmin and Tanita.

It's not too far fetched to imagine that they teamed up to bring together a high tech scale which required a Garmin watch (or other device) to operate. Noting nefarious about a symbiotic business deal.