I want to get more intentional about my fitness and measuring my performance and whatnot. As such, I’m in the market for fitness tracking technology for the first time.
However, I’m very much a Free Software / self-hosted sort of person, and I’m very un-thrilled about how proprietary all this stuff seems. It looks like the sensors themselves are kind of standardized (“ant+”, whatever that is), and some of the data formats can be imported and exported, but the bike computers themselves and the companion apps and the online services appear to be trying to become walled gardens.
Short of building a bike computer from components myself, what hardware and software should I be looking into?
Edit: my most immediate concern is figuring out what bike computer to get, to be able to log data from the ANT+ speed, cadence, and heart rate sensors I’ve already bought (along with a GPS track). I’m considering anything from a Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt V3 ($300), to an off-brand(?) one like a Magene C506 ($100) or iGPSSport BSC100S ($38), to using my smartphone with an ANT+ dongle and the “A Training Tracker” app (Github, Play Store).
Gadgetbridge supports some Garmin bike computers, and there may be some early support for other devices if you check the git repo.
Besides that, since Garmin devices at least can be run offline I’ve taken to manually documenting important data in a table. This might sound annoying, but it only takes a minute or two and forces me to reflect on the workout, compared to just passively collecting data. And it also means I’m in control of the data and since it’s not tied to any device or ecosystem, I can switch to a different watch/bike computer in the future without any threat to my data.
And if you structure the data correctly (and you are technically inclined) you can still build your own graphs, calculate statistics, etc
I’m pretty sure you can connect the Garmin to a computer and access the files, and grab the fit files with your activities. Might not be an open way to analyze them right now, but having them would be the first step for future planning.
Yeah, that’s another approach. It’s a bit bugged on my Linux system unfortunately, but a good option if gadgetbridge or other alternatives are not supported for a given device.