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Comment by vader1 | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Garmin the day Fitbit sold out and haven't touched the Fitbit since. I'm very happy with the switch, the Garmin (Vivosmart 4) app and device are actually better than Fitbit's on almost every account, so that's a double win :)

The only unfortunate consequence is that Garmin's import service only imports very coarse data from your Fitbit export, so all detailed historic records are lost unless you manually dig through your Fitbit export files. I hope Garmin will still provide a 100% complete importer in the future.

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Any idea how data exporting is with the Vivosmart 4? I thought about getting one but one of my main use cases for getting a fitness tracker is exporting data and then creating custom visualizations from it. I haven't dug into this world much yet but curious what the best hardware would be for this use case.

If you sync to garmin connect its easy enough to manually download many different formats of activity recording for fitness activities. I don't have a vivosmart but I haven't had issues collecting data from my Fenix watch.

There is a service I do like from https://tapiriik.com/ that will sync all your fitness data across a bunch of common fitness apps (it helps when all your friends want to link up for activities but nobody agrees on a single tracking platform). One of the sync options is just to directly download all the raw datafiles to dropbox which is pretty convenient.

If none of those sound good you could roll your own from the source code to tapiriik which is available here: https://github.com/cpfair/tapiriik . It does use some hacks to get around garmin not making all their APIs easy for personal development.

Like the sibling comment mentions, there is a free Garmin Connect online service that lets you upload the data via bluetooth to your phone and then your phone transmits it to the Garmin server. From there the way I use it is to automatically send it to my Strava account (it's my only active social media account) and manually I download the raw data file from Garmin's Connect website to my PC so I can import it into Golden Cheetah for some analysis and personal backup. One could directly download the file from most devices to your laptop via wire or bluetooth, but that may not be as convenient as doing everything electronically. Also, I've actually worn out several USB connectors on fitness devices just from plugging/unplugging over the years so avoiding using physical ports for data transfers is a priority for me.

The exports from Garmin's Connect aren't always easy (though they improved at around the same time that GDPR came into force). At one time, it was necessary to download each day's dataset individually.

The FIT file format isn't fully documented (SDK has encumbrances and perhaps cost -- it's been a while since I checked).

Here are some of the tools I've used with Vivosmart HR and Fenix 3HR FIT files. They're not polished for easy usage, but they'll get a technically-skilled hacker started. The core is Kiyokazu Suto's 'fitdump' perl.

https://github.com/4kbt/ParseVivosmartHR

I haven't tried with a Vivosmart 4 but most Garmin devices can be directly mounted as a USB drive and then you can copy the FIT files. There is an SDK available for parsing the files.

https://www.thisisant.com/developer/

I'd buy a Garmin if they provided a FitBit importer.

open source and reverse engineers assemble

If only we could get a sense of how many people would actually use such a thing. I've got a feeling that 97% of FitBit users don't care, but if enough of them did then it could be a potentially profitable(albeit short-lived) piece of software.

They do: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=HfJ4xPchdD3cmZ2qtDpOR8...

But it currently only imports coarse data, e.g. your average heartrate on a given day. Not the granular minute-by-minute information.

Sleep statistics currently aren't imported at all.

I sold my Fitbit for a Garmin in the last month and the importer really didn't do much. Fitbit only gives 31 days of data.

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