Comment by levocardia
4 days ago
You can literally connect your Garmin to your computer via USB and drag-and-drop the raw activity files and analyze them if you want. Works totally fine. But Garmin's cloud sync is convenient and cloud processing adds data like elevation (by cross-matching GPS to topo data).
That only gives you the activities though, doesn't it? Not the 24/7 metrics the device is also collecting outside of started/stopped activities.
I've been trying to get developer access to my watch, but seems for months the Garmin Developer Program doesn't seem to accept any "requests". The only thing I've seen working, is the full account export, but that takes ~3 days for me from pressing the button until I get the email. Besides that, syncing via Bluetooth and reverse-engineer their own protocol that runs there, seems to be the only way, sadly.
Can't you just connect via USB (oldschool method from before their devices even had Bluetooth) and dump the data the old fashioned way ?
I used to use Garmin offline like that with GoldenCheetah[0], it was my weekly ritual to analyse progress.
[0]: https://www.goldencheetah.org/
This does not work for golf, I tried to get the activity but could not find it.
This wouldn't sync over any of the data points that are calculated by the device, VO2 max, various sleeps cores, etc. Probably a good thing as those things are rarely all that useful.
All of that data is on the device and can be copied as .FIT files. Some of the fields aren't publicly documented, though.