The Tide Widget Petition

GARMIN INSTINCT TIDE HACK USING CALENDAR WIDGET

For Christmas (2020) my lovely wife gave me a Garmin Instinct. It was a complete surprise. I really love the watch, but like everyone else, I was quite disappointed to discover there is no tide widget, and there is no sign of mercy after all these years from the Garmin overlords. I was at the beach complaining to my brother about the issue when he cleverly shut me down by suggesting I look into adding daily tide information as a Calendar event. After experimenting a bit later on I found the hack works quite well. Thanks Dawg! This hack may have been done before, but I haven't seen it. 

Every day I can now use the Instinct's calendar widget to see all the tide info for that day. Once synced with Garmin Connect the tide info remains available for the whole day (and the next day) without requiring further connection - handy when out in the water away from the phone. 

Tide calendar event example shown in photo below:

Subject: Tides @ Sydney

Start Date: 5th Jan 2021

Location: 0132 1.2   0711 0.5 1329 1.5   2011 0.3

All Day Event: TRUE

Notes:

1. Times is 24H and height in meters. Sorry have not experimented in feet.
2. I use Google calendar and was able to automatically create a "Tides @ Sydney" event each day of the month by importing a CSV file to a "Tides" calendar I created. With Google, the CSV file needs the columns to have headings listed above. Additional info on importing calendars is easily available on the web. 
3. There are limitations to what Garmin displays on the watch:
   1. Description does not show on the watch, but Location does.
   2. There is a Location character limit. In order to fit 4 tides a day this simplified format with "#" spacing works well "0132#1.2###0711#0.5#1329#1.5###2011#0.3"
4. Quickly obtaining and formatting the raw data for the CSV may be a challenge. I can show how I did it if people are interested.
5. Ideally someone could create a script that used a web feed to automatically create tide events, avoiding the CSV completely. 

Hope this helps! I would still prefer a widget please Garmin!

regards, 

Pecs Malone.

Sydney, Australia.

Your condescending tone grates me. The Garmin Instinct watch was a gift, so I had no chance to check it's features. The first thing I said after unwrapping was "Great, this watch will have tides". But although it has a whole lot of other widgets like Moons, Weather, Calendar, etc, I was really surprised and annoyed that Garmin expects you to pay TWICE to get Tides. I have shown the watch to many friends who are in the market for a similar watch, but they are put off because there is no tide widget. It's not like the architecture of the watch does not support such a thing. Clearly you have zero interest in boating, fishing or surfing, or you earn so much money you don't care about throwing it away. Please don't speak for the rest of us.

yeah.  there are 2 users on this forum (trux and gaijin) who continually like to chime in against supporting tides for the instinct. They seem to be either employees of Garmin defending the decision, people who have spent more for another watch that have tides and dont want anyone else to have it, or just trolls.  I like your hack for getting tides in via the calendar.  I think I will work on a script to automate it.  But I also agree that adding Tides (when they have moons, weather, etc.) should not be difficult.  It is just syncing a table.  nothing more.

... or, if you prefere the solution with the Google Calendar - there is for example this script: Google Calendar Tide Chart for Surfers

Edit: ... and another one here: gist.github.com/.../6515916

I am new to the forum and new to Garmin, so thanks for the background info. Excellent if you can automate! That eliminates the chance for human error which exists with my CSV method. Ideally such a script would tap into an international tide chart feed - although as yet I have not found one. But programming is not my main gig so I may be looking in the wrong places. Tides4Fishing is where I copied raw data for my CSV, and that covers Oceania. I printed their tide chart info to PDF, converted the PDF to CSV, copied the tide columns into another spreadsheet that quickly adjusts the format to suit the Instinct display, copy the formatted columns into another CSV that is used to import into Google Calendar. Takes about 10 minutes to format and import 1 month of tide events.

I prefer the Instinct screen over colour screen as the single crystal layer provides a much better contrast and is just as easy to read as the old fashioned LCD watches. Also, after trying another colour watch with map overlay I think it clutters the tiny screen too much. The "bread crumb" works better for me. If I need more info from time to time I can take my phone out and use it's map which is far more effective. But I understand that some people wont have a phone as a backup. 

I agree, the original Instinct is in the price bracket for G shock owners who want to step up a bit but not too much. But they will want tide as that has traditionally been a G shock focus. For water people the tide is often more important than GPS, and people will not pay top dollar for tide when you can buy the GBX100 for far less.

Pecs Malone said:

For water people the tide is often more important than GPS,

In that case I do not understand why those people continue buying a watch that has no tides functionality built in, and then reclaim the feature here. There are other alternatives, so why not choosing the one meeting your needs?

I have been following this thread and do think that it would be simple for Garmin to add tides and they should.  But since this is not likely to happen, I have seen other posts where people have used PHP and other scripting tools to create a CSV file to allow you to import tide data into a google calendar that can then be displayed on your watch.  I dont think that this is ideal.  But since I really dont think that Garmin is going to change their mind (they really should), using a google map will get me at least close to what I want.

I dont do PHP, so I decided to write a .NET Core app that will run on most any machine that has .NET Core installed (Windows, Mac, Linux).  It will allow you to pass parameters for beginDate, endDate, station ID (from NOAA) and a filename to output the CSV to.  What I did is just run it from 1/1/2021 through 12/31/2021 so that I can populate data for the entire year.  You can get my code on Github here:

dafoink/tidesToGoogleAPI (github.com)

You can find out a NOAA stationID closed to you by going here:  CO-OPS Map - NOAA Tides & Currents

For example, I live on Cape Hatteras, NC.  My Station ID is 8654467