Garmin .fit files

[datawookie]

Hi Hannah,

A colleague just brought this package to my attention. As a runner this is really interesting to me! I use a Garmin and have loads of .fit files stashed on my laptop. I see that these are not currently handled by trackeR. Would you be interested in a contribution to handle this format?

Best regards,
Andrew.

[ikosmidis]

Hi Andrew,

.fit support is in our wishlists for a while. So, feel free to have a go with it; a fork, a branch and a pull request would be most convenient, and a few examples to test things out will help Hannah and I to test things out.

Here are some resources, in case you haven't seen them already:

Figure 1 of the package vignette shows where a readFIT function should be in the package hierarchy, Section 3 explains the structure that the resulting data frame should have for the trackeRdata constructor function, and Table 3 shows the currently supported units including the default units that trackeRdata uses when units = NULL.

Thanks,
Ioannis

[hfrick]

Hi @datawookie

what @ikosmidis said - support for .fit would be great! 🙌

Hannah

[datawookie]

Great. I'll try to carve out some time to work on this.

[krissen]

+1, .fit -support would be great. There is an archived project, fitdc which seems to work on .fit files I have before ca. 2014. For files created after that, it does not.

[ikosmidis]

We have plans for a way to support fit files (and many more). Though, this will take some time as it requires a whole new package.

Direct .fit support in trackeR is tricky because of licencing and can be a tough maintenance (if G decides to change things).

[Ainsworld]

I've successfully imported FIT files using this new package. Perhaps some collaboration opportunity?
https://grimbough.r-universe.dev/FITfileR
https://github.com/grimbough/FITfileR

[ikosmidis]

Cool! Thanks @Ainsworld!

I will write to the author. The package looks promising, especially if licencing issues are avoided (maintenance, of course, can get tricky if G decides to change the format).

[Ainsworld]

My wahoo bike computer's export format is .fit too, so that probably means changes are less likely.

[liversedge]

The Garmin file structure is not likely to change (i.e. message processing), but the types get extended regularly. For example new telemetry and device types come to market and they want to store data in .FIT files without using "developer fields".

In GoldenCheetah we try to automate this by parsing the SDK Fit Header and generating symbols we can use in the code- we use a janky python script to do this (https://github.com/GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah/tree/master/util/fit)

The file is then posted to the GC website so the desktop app can download and refresh, its here (for the current version) http://www.goldencheetah.org/defaults/3.7/FITmetadata.json