Communicating with Raspberry Pi or Arduino

Former Member over 6 years ago

Hi,

I would really like to be able to send live data (heart rate, stress, GPS, steps, distance, calories etc) to either a Raspberry Pi or Arduino over Bluetooth or WiFi without the need for my phone. I.e. the Raspberry Pi could connect to the Garmin watch (in my case a Vivoactive 3) pretending to be a phone if need be and then access the live telemetry. Alternatively, a ConnectIQ app on the watch that sends the data via Bluetooth or WiFi without using Garmin Connect to the RPi/Arduino.

Is there any way of achieving this functionality?

R

danlorek over 6 years ago

I do not know of method to connect to the watch directly without Garmin Connect. As far as I can tell, you would have to reverse engineer/hack the protocol used by Connect to the device.

The simplest approach would be to have a web server setup on the pi or Arduino device such as an ESP32 that your phone connects to via WIFI. Then you use the MakeWebRequest to send JSON to your server with the information you are after.Basically, your phone acts as a relay to send the information to your end device in this case the pi/Arduino.

https://developer.garmin.com/downloads/connect-iq/monkey-c/doc/Toybox/Communications.html#makeWebRequest-instance_method

I use a similar approach to control GoPros via the watch in my app:
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/8ac815d0-c476-4abd-8f29-98da8e7aac3c