Thursday, June 13, 2013

Beaglebone Black, ANT+, and Garmin FR70



My BBB is running Debian. Your mileage may vary if your BBB is running the stock Ångström.

Just successfully extracted data from my Garmin FR70 to BBB via a Garmin ANT+ USB stick. The steps are quite simple once you figured what software you need.

Note that different version of Garmin products use different protocol to communicate. The program Garmin-Forerunner-610-Extractor supports the followings:

 - Garmin Forerunner 60
 - Garmin Forerunner 405CX
 - Garmin Forerunner 310XT
 - Garmin Forerunner 610
 - Garmin Forerunner 910XT
 - Garmin FR70
 - Garmin Swim


Basically you just follow the instructions on the page. To sync with your BBB the first time, remember to turn on the Pairing function on you device. On my FR70, it is under Settings > System > Computer > Pairing.

For other devices

If you are using other devices that are not supported by Garmin-Forerunner-610-Extractor, go check out garmin-ant-downloader (this can be installed via apt-get). If you are using garmin-ant-downloader, your may need to create the USB serial device manually on your BBB. After you plugged in the ANT+ USB stick, use the lsusb command to list the device:
debian@debian-armhf:~/garmin$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 058f:6254 Alcor Micro Corp. USB Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 154b:0062 PNY
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0fcf:1008 Dynastream Innovations, Inc.


The last device is my ANT+ stick. The garmin-ant-downloader needs to access the stick via a serial device. By default, it is the /dev/ttyUSB0. If it is not created automatically, use the following command:
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x0fcf product=0x1008


Where 0x0fcf and 0x1008 are the code from the lsusb command result. Use the values that correspond to the output of your stick.

2 comments:

  1. Hello, I am currently working with the ANT+ USB-m stick and the beaglebone black. I am also working with an oxygen sensor that uses ANT+ technology and it requires specific profiles to connect, like heart rate profile, speed and cadence profile, oxygen profile ect.. I was wondering if there is any way we could set up the beaglebone with the ANT+ USB-m stick and my oxygen sensor? Thanks!

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  2. Hi Licelotte. The examples in my post were using ANT-FS. If your device that, you can copy and data out and process it this way too.

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