Foolography Community

Oliver wrote: ↑

February 7th, 2020, 11:26 am

We have actually thought about it.
But Garmin is not very helpful - they've ignored my many requests for Developer information entirely...
So we would have to reverse engineer everything, and currently don't have the capacity for this...

You can scan for devices that are advertising, but you can't advertise with CIQ BLE. It's mainly intended to connect to BLE sensors and not have a watch act as one..

Oliver wrote: ↑

December 15th, 2020, 10:41 pm

Hi Reginald,

I had a quick look through the Garmin Connect IQ Forums and Garmins documentation about this, to make sure I hadn't missed something.

Unfortunately, the Garmin SDK is only for connecting to sensors to use the data in an app on your Garmin device. In other words: The Garmin device needs to be the central, and whatever you want to connect to, needs to be a peripheral device. To connect to the Unleashed, we'd need this to work the other way round, as the Unleashed acts as a central to connect to accessories:

You can scan for devices that are advertising, but you can't advertise with CIQ BLE. It's mainly intended to connect to BLE sensors and not have a watch act as one..

We implemented both roles in the Unleashed, but at the moment, the peripheral role is meant only for our App to connect to. The Unleashed can connect to accessories using it's central role, as any other kind of device we've wanted to connect to has been a peripheral. It might be possible to allow a second connection to our peripheral role, but this would be a huge change on our side, which is not on our to-do list at the moment.

I don't know if you saw, but we added support for multiple external GPS receivers quite a while ago, including the Transystem GL-770, which is the only GPS I know of that supports the Standard "LNS" Service, as described in the Bluetooth Low Energy Specification. If Garmin would simply implement this, it would require virtually no change in our firmware to support it.

Have a look at our Blog entry about this: https://www.foolography.com/2019/11/28/ ... unleashed/


That said, I would love to support Garmin devices, so we might look into it some more in the future!

Oliver wrote: ↑

December 15th, 2020, 11:28 pm

Oh, no, sorry to hear about your D500!

Well, I wasn't saying you have to buy one, but rather wanted you to know about it, so that if it's important enough to you, that there are options already available. Also, so that you know we do add features like this sometimes, and are continuously improving the Unleashed.

I understand that many of our customers are hesitant to buy a separate GPS device, which is one of the main reasons we made the Unleashed with an app in the first place: while it's not a perfect replacement for a dedicated GPS receiver, it does give you a decent position for free, and added so many more possibilities for other features!
But if you're not happy with the location data coming from a smartphone - you're going to have to get a compatible GPS. Now I know, we've talked about this with you and many others - we also wish we could have made the Bad Elf GPS devices compatible, but it was simply not feasible. Same with Garmin - due to lack of an API on their part, it was also not feasible all this time. It's looking a bit better now, they seem to be heading in the right direction, but we're still not quite there yet.

We really do our best to make all our customers happy, but cannot fulfil every wish, and especially not by Christmas (or any other deadline that's just around the corner) ;-)
Sometimes our hands are tied by incompatible technologies, sometimes it's economic factors where we have to weigh the effort (and associated cost) against the gain, ie how many additional Unleasheds do we expect to sell if we add a certain feature? Usually it's just the length of our backlog...