ANT Forum

Hi

We are looking for someone who has good understanding of ANT+ and Garmin devices to guide us to start a project. The project's goal is to connect a boat to a Garmin watch and an iOS App to get boat information and send commands to the boat in order to steer it.

We need to understand how to develop on a Linux IOT Gateway (on a rasperry pi). What is the best way of doing it or where we should start? We have been looking into ANT+ project start guide, seen some python API implementations of ANT+. But it is hard to know the start point.

We would appreciate some guidance.

Thanks in advance.      

Hi,

I am myself a beginner and I also struggle with the start of my ANT+ project. Which ANT+ python API are you using? I wonder why you want to implement such a project with ANT+? I would assume that the ANT+ protocol is quite strictly defined and mainly specified for interaction with standardised ANT+ devices (e.g. heart rate monitors, bicyle cadence, ...).

Best      

What kind of boat do you want to steer?

I would always take into account that ANT is by it's nature not the most reliable protocol. There is the ability to send acknowledged messages, but it can still happen quite often that messages are not received, especially when distances get bigger (> 2-3 meters)

Cheers
Ilja      

Hi @AlexDer

Unfortunately the project was already decided, the hardware was chosen and now they want to implement the functionality they had in mind.

The python library I was looking at was https://github.com/mvillalba/python-ant
I did not really get in to it but that was an option I was thinking of.

I see a lot of complexity in this and choosing ANT over, for example, Bluetooth makes it difficult in my belief. IF nothing else, but out of the documentation and examples point of view. It is more difficult to find info about ANT. The few examples I found are all about heart rate so you are right I think this is to specific for some common cases.

best      

Hi @ibooij

This is a new boat in construction. The choice of using ANT may not be the best one probably but right now they have decided on this. I am just trying to explain them that this will be a major effort to implement as desired.

It is an interesting point of view that ANT is not so reliable. This I will also point as a cons.

best      

Hi,

Perhaps ANT is still a good fit, but I guess you will have to give some more information about what the use case is exactly to determine if it fits here. What are the distances between sender and receiver, for instance?

It's no problem creating your own protocol on top of ANT, which you would want to do here.

Cheers,
Ilja
     

Hi

The distance wont be a problem. You are suppose to be on the boat and the boat is no more then 7-8 meters long.

The boat will have a Garmin Multi Function Display. And the owner of the boat will have a Garmin Marq Captain watch. And through the watch we want the ability of getting boat info and steering the boat, controlling the onboard music interface etc.
But my understanding is that MFD is limited in speaking CAN-BUS. So we will need to have a Linux Gateway for some more detailed implementation in order to steer the boat. And there we will implement own protocols to get commands from a connected Garmin device/watch.

We want to get info of the Boat, speed, position etc. and this should be possible to get from the Garmin sensors, I think.
But than we want to be able to start and stop the boat, steer it, have an owner and a list of connected users. A lot of this will need even to be implemented as a mobile app, to get a good user experience in my belief. But even if we would do it in the watch itself it should require own ANT protocol implementation and would require some time. And this is what I am trying to determine.

As you say it is probably not a problem to create own protocols. But It is more time demanding than if we had what we desired through ConnectIQ API or through Garmin Apps. Which was the belief when the project had started, that there are a lot of Garmin apps or built-in functionalities that we could use without to much effort.

best      

Hi,

I'm using the same library. with https://johannesbader.ch/blog/track-your-heartrate-on-raspberry-pi-with-ant/ I was able to set up the ant+ dongle and checked with a heart rate monitor if everything works.
Afterwards, you can start to reprogram the python package. Use debug to see the exchanged massages from read and write of the driver class. Later program a new class in messages and add it to getHandler, this is what I would try as a first step...

Best      

Hi

Thanks AlexDer. I will try and see how this goes.

Best.