[Pkg-running-devel] forerunner 310xt support for garmin-ant-downlaoder

[kristof.ralovich at gmail.com]

Dear All,

I have joined this list after some prior correspondence on the topic
with Christian
PERRIER. I'm an orienteering runner, with the dream to have open-source
orienteering training analysis software, including gps track downloading
and route review, properly package up and distributed. This pipeline exists
for windows: [1].

When I started working towards this in my free-time around 2010, there was
no working Linux tool to download tracks from my Forerunner 310XT. So
ANT+minus was born ([2]) and this year it became stable enough that I
thought sharing it was justified.

On the other hand Debian already has a very similar package,
garmin-ant-downloader (g-a-d), that covers downloading tracks from the
Forerunner 405. Here it is worth to mention that the 405 and 310XT use
different messages over the ANT protocol. The former uses a dialect of
ANT+, while the latter uses standard ANT-FS. Currently g-a-d implements
parts of ANT+, while ANT+minus implements most of ANT-FS. Thus I would like
to enhance g-a-d with ANT-FS implementation from my ANT+minus project.

My integration plan would be to "fuse" the functionality of antpm into
g-a-d, and have a single package/single executable that deals with
FR405/FR310 (or other watches that use the same ANT variants). What I would
really like to avoid is end-users having two packages with same
functionality, just working on different GPS watches! Original gant is
unmaintained (last commit from 2011 [3]) and without dedicated upstream
developers (as far as i can tell, correct me if i'm wrong). The package
name g-a-d on the other hand is just perfect, it described what the
software stands for, no ambiguity. Furthermore g-a-d already has a simple
python gui that i would like to extend for ANT-FS downloads too.

For this end, my ongoing is work is published at [4] for now in the
antpm-integration1 branch. This started as a clone of the debian source
repository of garmin-ant-downloader. The sources are under continuous
integration, and build tested with gcc and clang for a few weeks now [5].
There was one existing bug I found against g-a-d in the debian bug
database, I've written a patch to solve this, please see [6].

After all this said, I have the following questions to you:
- Do you agree with my plans to extend g-a-d with ANT-FS functionality, and
thus download capability from more GPS devices.
- I'm offering my help to co-maintain g-a-d, and provide patches! Is anyone
in this group willing to incorporate my patches against g-a-d?
- What is the preferred way to provide patches for g-a-d? (send patch to
mailing list or provide branch for merging)

1:
http://o-training.net/blog/2011/04/13/gps-analysis-for-orienteering-the-basics
2: https://code.google.com/p/antpm
3: http://www.ethgen.ch/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gant.git
4: https://github.com/ralovich/garmin-ant-downloader/tree/antpm-integration1
5: https://travis-ci.org/ralovich/garmin-ant-downloader
6: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=690068#15

Thank you,
Kristof
-- 
RALOVICH, Kristof
PhD candidate
Computer Aided Medical Procedures
Technical University Munich
http://campar.in.tum.de/Main/KristofRalovich
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