Can you setup a forerunner 945 watch without connecting to a phone

I just received the Forerunner 945 watch. It looks like it wants me to pair to a phone in order to set it up. We are planning on writing our own apps did not plan to have a phone in the loop. Is the phone only needed for set up or does it always need to be in the loop? Can I set up the watch without pairing it?

0 jim_m_58 over 5 years ago

Much of what is typically done can be done with wifi and/or Garmin Express, when it comes to things like syncing and FW updates, but it's more of a manual thing.

Some of it depends on the apps you are writing. For example, to do a makeWebRequest, you need the phone. If you plan on using the typical app settings to configure your app, using a phone is easier than hooking up to a pc/mac when you want to change something.

0 7531701 over 5 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

My problem is that I am going to be setting up more than 50 watches. I do not have any phones associated with them. I do not want a Garmin account associated with them. How do I set up the watch? It looks like I have to connect it to a phone at least once. Thanks for your help.

0 jim_m_58 over 5 years ago in reply to 7531701

Ok, this is going to be a bit messy It's not just the initial setup, but it's ongoing stuff, such as FW updates, and if you use GPS, it's things like new CPE files that expire every week or 2.

What you can do is assign a set of watches to a GC account - say 5-10 of them, so 5-10 accounts - and then use GE to get these updates.

Or have one "master" device that gets these updates, save off the multiple file (from multiple folders) before they are installed and copy then to the other 49 devices.

Again, you wont be using something like makeWebRequest calls to transfer data to a common location, correct?