Kitesurf App - FIT file access

Former Member
Former Member
Hi,

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, I have tried digging around and using the search (which seems to return a lot of unrelated results)

I have been looking at trying to make a kite surf app for my Fenix 3, and in the last couple of days have put together a single screen app that gives speed, distance, time etc.

There are 2 points I had wanted to improve over the built in functions.

1.
One of the common complaints on the fenix is the elevation data, GPS elevation is inherently inaccurate and polled too slowly and the baro altimeter is slow/smoothed/hysteresis, therefore never tracks jumps correctly.
My intention had been to start working on a way of calculating height using the accelerometer data (woo style), however looking into it, the limitation at the moment might be getting this data out, I had hoped that although restricted in what data we could put in a FIT file, you could at least dictate it's origin, however all I can seem to find is that you turn recording on and it is all populated from its default fields

2.
Calorie calculation - I do not wear a heart rate monitor for kiting so there is no data for it to use to calculate calories from that, again I had hoped to be able to overwrite the calorie field based on an average calorie burn per minute for kite-surfing, at the moment I have created a custom app defined as 'other' and the calorie count seems very high.
This would obviously be solved by an expansion of the available sports types built into the watch, or at least an explanation of how each calculates calories etc. seeing as kitesurfing is listed for the connect categorisation but not the watch.

Firstly am I wrong and can I feed in elevation/calorie data from where I want or is it locked down?
Second, I have seen some comments about FIT files opening up in Q2 of 2016, is this still on track? If so would this in theory give me what I want be it modifying the standard elevation data or creating a new 'jump' track within the FIT file.

Thanks for any help!
  • The source for elevation and calorie information is currently locked down. It has not been made clear that the upcoming enhancements to ConnectIQ will allow overwriting of the values that the device supplies.

    As for the new feature question, Garmin is typically pretty quiet about progress. I've been paying a lot of attention to this, and there has not been any mention of it for a while now. I'm assuming that is because it is being worked on. But if my understanding of what has been announced is correct, you'd be able to create a new stream of data for your app as you suggest. You may have to write some code so that the data could be presented properly on Garmin Connect, but it sounds like that is all part of the functionality that is being proposed.

    Travis
  • Former Member
    Former Member over 9 years ago
    Thanks for the reply!

    I guess there's nothing stopping me carrying on trying to implement the features I want, will just have to wait to get it any further than the watch screen.
  • Hi twain 155,
    have you published your app on the app store?

    I'm getting my fenix 3 today and I'm also going to use it for kiteboarding.
    Have been looking around for a dedicated kite app... jump height would be nice to have!