This post is about getting running data off of a Garmin Forerunner 305 and uploaded to the Garmin Connect website. This post follows my previous post on the Garmin forerunner and Ubuntu 12.04 Basically I will repeat these previous instructions, making sure that everything can still be done on Ubuntu 14.04-- the good news is that everything works on 14.04, so read on if you are interested.

• First, we install some dependencies:

  $ sudo apt-get install garmin-forerunner-tools libxml2-utils

• Second, we grab code from a git repository (do this in a directory where you want the code to reside-- I'll do this in ~/gitlocal/):

  $ cd ~/gitlocal/
  $ git clone git@github.com:cstrelioff/garmin-dev.git

  Note: Edit: 2015, Aug 27

  The above git clone command uses ssh and will only work if you have a github account setup and have an ssh key on file. If you don't and would rather not bother setting that up you can

  1. Dowload a zip of the repository from the github page and unzip on your local computer-- look for the Download ZIP button on the right side of the page.
  2. Or, use git with https instead of ssh. This changes the git clone command to

     $ git clone https://github.com/cstrelioff/garmin-dev.git

• Finally we are ready to get data. I will give one approach -- start by making a directory where the data will be saved. For example,

  $ mkdir ~/GarminData
  $ cd ~/GarminData

Next, we connect the watch to the computer using the usb cable and obtain the data from the watch:

$ garmin_save_runs

If there is data on the watch, this command should produce *.gmn files that use the directory structure: Year/Month/*.gmn.

Finally, the *.gmn files need to be converted to *.tcx for upload to Garmin Connect. It is probably good to choose a consistent place to do this. For example, create a directory called tcxfiles:

$ mkdir ~/GarminData/tcxfiles
$ cd ~/GarminData/tcxfiles/

A command to do the conversions has to provide full paths for gmn2tcx and the input *.gmn file. So, try something like this if you've used the directory structure discussed above:

$ ~/gitlocal/garmin-dev/gmn2tcx ~/GarminData/DataFromWatch/Year/Month/file.gmn > run-name.tcx

Be sure to change ~/GarminData/DataFromWatch/Year/Month/file.gmn to something that makes sense. If all went well, the file run-name.tcx (change this filename to something sensible as well) will be in your local directory and ready to upload. Of course, in the short run you'll want to write a script to automate this process and avoid the typing.