Notices

Update: from a short digging in the code, it seems that when using the alive tech heart monitor, a separate gps transmitter unit was used, so it seems logical that with FRWD B600 when gps is requested the unit bluetooth channel is already used for the heart monitor... Probably we have to wait developers, no free time to dig any more now...

Hello

Currently eCoach is able to get only heart rate data from FRWD B600. GPS data comes from the internal GPS of n810. Getting GPS data from FRWD is something that someone could do... we are currently concentrating on using internal GPS on n810.

Hi Sampppa,

if you use the Frwd gps as the system gps (i.e. it is configured in the gps setting menu of 8x0 devices) it works as gps, but not as heart monitor - it should really be something about sync/procedure calling order. The app - when gpsd is using the frwd as a gps - reply that no bluetooth channels are available, but the fact is that it should use the same already socketed for the gps...
I had success in using the Frwd as heart monitor and an external Ld3w (nokia gps module) but after 40-50 secs of running the bluetooth connection hangs and no more data are being recorded. Any hints different than dig in the code? In any case, the gps used should not matter if you use the gps daemon...
Btw, thank you for the app!

Well i havent got FRWD working with heart rate data if it is as system gps. I guess it is not possible..

One thing could be to parse GPS data from the FRWD output at the same time when heartrate data is parsed and to use that gps data without using gpsd.

We have external gps (LD3W) so we could try to reproduce that problem you had with it. I cant give you more info about that yet.

Ideal would be that user can use what ever GPS he/she wants to. But using FRWD as GPS device and heart rate monitor simultaneously might be something to do later...

Does it hang everytime you use it with external GPS device? We did a quick test with LD3W and N810 with internal gps disabled and it worked fine.
"40-50 secs of running the bluetooth connection hangs and no more data are being recorded"
which bluetooth connection hangs, GPS or FRWD?

I did some quick test:
n800, diablo, ld3w, frwd b600
usually in less than 30 secs, the bluetooth connection with the b600 is lost, while no problem seems to be present with nokia gps
I checked my previous gpx, and found only one of them where the heart monitor had been recorded for more time - around 1'40" - before loosing connection. If there is some debug trigger - or if you like to send me a binary with debug enabled - i'll be glad to be of any help!

Does ecoach work with any other bluetooth heart rate monitors eg Polar? Have you tested this?
179Euros for the B600 is fairly mad when a standard bluetooth HRM costs 30-40 Euros..

eCoach has now also support for Zephyr HxM bluetooth heart rate monitor. It costs around 100e...AFAIK polar doesnt currently sell bluetooth heart rate monitors, they have only one model which was bundled with Nokia N79 active. Its true that bt HRMs are still a bit expensive compared to normal RF only HRMs.

Info about Zephyr HxM
http://www.zephyr-technology.com/hxm.html

//Sampo

whoa didn't know about this app, is there any upcoming support for N900 eCoach? heart rate monitor option is a win since nokia sports tracker doesnt fully support that.

There is already N900 version of eCoach, i will upload new version today to extras-devel and testing. New version includes bugfixes and some usability improvements.

I will also update eCoach website when i have some time