Expedition Navigation Software 
1 of 1- mikeleslie
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Offline - Registered: 5/16/2017
- Posts: 11
FIT file creation from expedition log.
Lately I've gotten sucked into the idea of creating recap videos to go along with the daily data show. hiding a chartplotter and then buying the discontinued 360 seems a bit stupid, considering that I collect lots of data already. The one thing garmin does make that I can use is the Virb edit software, which will do data overlays, can use footage from a gopro, and accepts GPX and FIT data files. The GPX files expedition creates work well, but I want more than COG and SOG, and for that I need to generate FIT files, which can be chock full of all kinds of data. Before I go down the path of spending the summer writing a program to convert an expedition log into a FIT file, I though I would ask if anyone here has thought about this or even done this. So is this a road already traveled and abandoned, or do I have a new sidejob for the summer? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
- barne
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
I was on the exact path some time ago. Garmin has for some time made a SDK available () but both the documentation and SDK itself was very heavy to digest at that time. However, thanks to your post, I had a look again and saw that things have changed.
The SDK is much more structured and contains both C, C++ and C# tools and examples if you're into the Visual Studio thing. More importantly they provide a jar file called FitCSVtool that can convert fit files to csv and the other way around (if the csv is well formed).
My guess is that the best way is probably to start with a fit file and convert it to csv and see what it looks like. Then create a csv using the same format and try convert it the other way.
One idea I had as well, was to hijack fit channels like heartrate, cycling pedal rate or something else and just put sailing data using them as placeholder and in this way get them available in the Virb Edit tool.
Since Nick already is fluent in the C languages, I guess it would be a walk in the part for him to make a fit format option in the "Extract log data" (assuming that the licence for it allows it). :-)
- mikeleslie
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
you would think it would be that easy, but......
The fields that they pass the data in are basically "comments" and then VIRB edit decodes them. Problem has been that I can not find any documentation on this, so I bought a used 360 and connected it to a garmin chartplotter at my local marine store to make a FIT file with all the data in it. So now I have a FIT file full of marine data, Hopefully I'm good enough to create one just like it from exp logs, as we won't have a garmin chartplotter onboard.
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Thread Starter- barne
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
If you now have a fit file with marine data, then theoretically you should just be able to use the FitCSVTool.jar file (through a batch file or from command prompt as java -jar FitCSVTool.jar) to convert it to csv. Then replacing data with updated ones from Expedition log file and convert it back.
Could you possibly share your populated fit file? It would be great having something with many marine channel headers in them for tests...
- mikeleslie
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
here's 2 files. they're short and the data is whatever the garmin simulator had, but It shows up in virb edit so I know there's data
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Thread Starter- rbhun
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- Registered: 7/05/2019
- Posts: 125
Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
I actually bothered Nick with this before, and asked him to implement communication with Virb360. It would be great to have it turn on record before buoys, or over 100% polar, etc. There is an RTSP stream too 
- Nick
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
Remind me again in the future ... I have a lot underway in Exp development at present though.
- rbhun
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
Nick wrote:
Remind me again in the future ...
how far into the future?
can I have the DTW sent out to my network somehow in a way I can catch it in programatically (like without going thru an NMEA decoder) and then I think I can get it trigger the API from Garmin...
- Nick
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
2022? I am not sure sorry.
- rbhun
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Re: FIT file creation from expedition log.
no worries.
I have, however, found this in the manual:
"to watches....via an ANT connection from a GPSmap plotter"
does it mean you can send data to the ANT network? or is it simply the same data and the plotter forwards it?
it would not work with a USB ANT device, would it now?