Sunday, June 19, 2005

Garmin Forerunner 301

Since I've a bit of experience with the 201, basic use was easy enough, but access to the raw data is a bit of a problem. It does not appear to be available in any obvious form -- Polar and Sunday products I've used are pretty easy to figure out.
Why do I care?
  1. First, I care because I care about openness.
  2. Second, I care because their analysis software is pretty fancy, but does not happen to be what I want. That is why open data is important.
  3. I want is to be able to look at the relationship between work performed and heart rate. I can do that with the GPS distance and altitude information plus heart rate -- not perfectly, but better than with distance alone.
I want the raw data.
I'm disappointed.
I sent Garmin a request for help on this; perhaps they will send me the internal format they use.