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wolfeh@lemmy.world

I'm looking for the most "open" fitness tracking system (bike computer, Strava alternative, etc.) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by grue@lemmy.world to c/bicycling@lemmy.world

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I want to get more intentional about my fitness and measuring my performance and whatnot. As such, I'm in the market for fitness tracking technology for the first time.

However, I'm very much a Free Software / self-hosted sort of person, and I'm very un-thrilled about how proprietary all this stuff seems. It looks like the sensors themselves are kind of standardized ("ant+", whatever that is), and some of the data formats can be imported and exported, but the bike computers themselves and the companion apps and the online services appear to be trying to become walled gardens.

Short of building a bike computer from components myself, what hardware and software should I be looking into?

Edit: my most immediate concern is figuring out what bike computer to get, to be able to log data from the ANT+ speed, cadence, and heart rate sensors I've already bought (along with a GPS track). I'm considering anything from a Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt V3 ($300), to an off-brand(?) one like a Magene C506 ($100) or iGPSSport BSC100S ($38), to using my smartphone with an ANT+ dongle and the "A Training Tracker" app (Github, Play Store).

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[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's actually not that bad depending on what you are trying to achieve. Many bike computers will show up as mass storage if you plug it them into your computer and you will be able to get the GPX files out of there without using some app or server or proprietary service. GPX files are just textfiles with a timestamp and a GPS coordinate. So they are a three as free as it gets. I'm using Geo Activity Playground on my computer to analyze my activities. That software shows me the tracks and overall statistics, heat maps and so on. Everything I was using Strava for. It's great. If you want to get more into training, you might want to try Golden Cheetah.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Many bike computers will show up as mass storage if you plug it them into your computer and you will be able to get the GPX files out of there without using some app or server or proprietary service.

Which ones? That's (one of) the kind(s) of information I was trying to find out from this thread!

[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

My Bryton Rider 15 does it, but if you have a certain model you want to buy, try to search for "model name mass storage" or something like this.