I own a Suunto T6 watch. The tech side of it appeals to the nerd in me and is one of major factors in encouraging me to exercise.
Their software frankly is shit. At best it's functional, at worst an exercise in bad design. I'm not saying that I'll do better but it will meet some of my requirements and hopefully those of other peoples.
Suunto have been un-helpful about an official method of interfacing with their product so my efforts use information that I've been able to find online, common sense and some reverse engineering of the binary file formats.
I'm hoping for suggestions fro you, comments to my suggestions and blah blah blah. Stuff I'd like to include;
- Better sort/find. (Show me all the sessions >40 minutes?. What sessions hit TE >4.0?)
- Nicer graphcs. (It's not the 1980's anymore guys, not even in Finland!)
- Better trending. (How is this year better than last year?)
- Attach to a session and display a Google/Microsoft map for a GPS recording.
- Maybe interface to other training sites like "mapmyrun.com"
I've no idea what else, but Suunto don't seem to be all that responsive so what harm can it do? My work is based from STraM 2.1 (2.2 killed my entire PC so I don't know at this stage if that breaks anything).
This is a project that meets my needs and entertains me (sad, eh?). If it benefits anyone else, thats great, and I look forward to suggestions.
7 comments:
Hi Simon
I think it's great that you do it. As a long time t6 user, I have a lot that I could wish for in their software. F.x. I have a GPS pod I use in the open and my old foot pod is now only for treadmill training - but can the PC Pod (Yeah I know I have most of the pods) receive (or rather the software) show my speed - NO. I don´t need 9 or more athletes figures only one - my own together with my pulse in pdm and % and my current speed. Same goes for my bike pod - it's the old one and I can't even use it on my new wheels... I also hope you get some inspiration from Willems doc. I think he was the one collecting wishes from t6 users.
I look forward to test your stuff.
BR
Enzo
The Suunto tech is good (mostly), the software functional at best.
I'd love to be able to bypass STraM totally but Suunto have not been very responsive.
I got some good stuff from Willem's efforts - he certainly helped clarify a few points when reversing the .dat formats for plotting on the chart.
Hi,
This sounds like a very interesting project!
I had toyed with the idea of creating a STramM like software for linux, that I could use with my T6, but could not find a decent graphing library to use (I briefly looked at gtkglgraph), so didn't really get started.
Did you write your own graphing code?
Does your software run only on windows? Or is it portable to linux or OSX?
Will you be releasing the source code to your project?
Hi Nick,
No, I didn't write my own graphing code! Most of the major UI components are 3rd party licensed products. I'd not really considered the question of source code but the library dependencies make that less useful.
I did write a library to decode the .dat files - it's not complete but it's probably >80% finished for read-only operations (lap markers that I've just started using are missing, for example) Now that was lots and lots of time with .dat files and a hex editor...
Hi. Nice initiative : ) Couple of things what bother me you might try to fix:
1. date format. When I download new training from T6, the date format will be 1.06.2008. It's a mess, as the trainings will be:
1.06.2008
3.03.2008
4.05.2008
Would be handy to have them in the format what sorts the trainings out automatically. E.g:
2008.03.03
2008.05.04
2008.06.01
(year.month.day)
2. I use notes. To specify how I feel, what kind of running I was doing, what kind of additional exercises etc. The problem - initially it allows to enter 255 characters. But after hitting OK, only 99 characters will be saved.
Illustrated:
http://i27.tinypic.com/s590z9.jpg
http://i26.tinypic.com/21mzp53.jpg
If you could try to fix this, would be great : )
Hi Kaimo,
Dates will be represented as per your computer locale norm but formatting aside, internally they're handled in the julian format you mention. That means they sort properly.
As for the notes, my code will just extract the embedded notes from STraM so if there's a bug there that will persist. Having said that it is my intention to add 'tags' for better filtering etc. I don't see why this cannot include additional text - I'm working on associating GPS data (.gpx files) for direct interfacing with Microsoft Live Maps. Basically what you're asking is for additional meta-data per session and that's already on the list
I just stumbled across your post on the Suunto T6 forum...wow...this is great... what is the status of your software? can I install and start using it...or still just your own personal version at this point?
maybe if enough of us write to suunto they will adopt your improvments!
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