81–90 of 232 posts
A close relation of mine got sick back country hiking and needed to text for someone to meet at a rendezous just this week using Garmin's texting services - I hope that this doesn't last long, I'd hate to think of what would happen if he'd tried to ask for help today. Edit: Looks like Garmin 'Explore' is still up, so maybe it'd still be OK.
Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can't see my history, surprised they don't cache that locally). Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can't say the same about my friends iWatches/fitbits or eve…
What about their Inreach products, which are designed for backcountry SOS emergency calls to search and rescue? That certainly needs a network.
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What about their Inreach products, which are designed for backcountry SOS emergency calls to search and rescue? That certainly needs a network.
From my understanding it doesn't rely on the internet or Garmin servers. I believe it was called Iridium satellite network. It needs to work anywhere on the planet. It is a separate subscription based service.
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Of course there isn't any guarantee that at some point, some marketing manager won't decide to break that.
It seems unlikely, Garmin is a very engineering led company. At least it was when I worked there 10 years ago! Part of that engineering focus is an insane attention to the BOM, and to support(call center) and warranty (returns & repairs) costs. I think both of these things make it unlikely that Garmin will add a cellular modem to start tracking otherwise unconnected devices.
Do they develop their own ASICs?
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I can't alter a watch face - i.e. alter the fields displayed. I'm not wanting to download a new face, just alter one already download and present in the app and on the watch, or alter any data fields around specific activities. I get syncing to any 3rd party service is clearly totally out unless I manually transfer the .fit file via USB and I understand why this would need their servers, although it would be good if…
There is absolutely no reason for requiring an internet connection for basic features such as setting an alarm or the 12/24h time format. I contacted Garmin customer support and they replied with corporate PR stuff, not answering my questions. I sold the watch a couple weeks later, won't buy Garmin again.
Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can't see my history, surprised they don't cache that locally). Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can't say the same about my friends iWatches/fitbits or eve…
I've been very slowly working on a fork of gadgetbridge[1] to support the vivofit 3 for a while now and can successfuly set the time with no account!
The internet-of-things that aren't really your things strikes again. When will manufacturers learn that their hardware should function even if their services are down? The whole account/subscription tacked on for no apparent reason thing is highly irritating, and Garmin is actually better than most.
Has anybody tried to reverse engineer garmin's bluetooth protocols? I often want to buy one of their smartwatches but the idea of having to install proprietary software on my phone kind of puts me off. I'd love to write my own software but I don't have any experience doing bluetooth RE.
It's mostly shambled together stuff but I have a wireshark plugin that works pretty good for the few pieces it supports
https://github.com/mjsir911/GarminBLE
I started this project with no bluetooth experience either, it's definitely been a lot of learning.
Let me know if you are interested in continuing / working on this, might give me a nudge to get back on it.
A close relation of mine got sick back country hiking and needed to text for someone to meet at a rendezous just this week using Garmin's texting services - I hope that this doesn't last long, I'd hate to think of what would happen if he'd tried to ask for help today. Edit: Looks like Garmin 'Explore' is still up, so maybe it'd still be OK.
I think the Inreach sat services operate on the iridium network. They don't sync with or connect to Garmin Connect based on my experiences.