ANT Forum

Many people with Garmin devices have Garmin ANT agent in their systems tray and it appears to run all the time.

Question is can user with one USB stick run Garmin ANT agent and another aplication that requires data from ANT channels through a single USB stick?

And if so:

How is the ANT channel allocation to be managed?

How many channels does Garmin ANT agent use?

How can I get my ap to select and unused channel successfully e.g. is there a primative that will return channel in use / allocated, or do I just try to allocate a channel and handle the error if the channel has a prior allocation?

If the problem can't be solved with one ANT+ stick then can it be solved with two or will the driver simply assume it's now got 16 channels for one application to monopolise?

Thanks for your help with this Rob      

Unfortunately, ANT Agent grabs exclusive access of your one ANT USB stick. So NO other application can use it while AA is running.
If you insert a 2nd (and 3rd, ...) stick, they can be used by other applications. The "usual" API call to open the ANT USB stick grabs the 1st unused ANT USB stick it finds.

Cheers,
OMB      

Thanks o_m_b - that's pretty much what we had figured out.

It was "the system" that directed me to the other post (as soon as it posted) as I guess the db search found that the subject lines of the two threads were similar.

The next question is can we put anything in our ap to seach for the other ap using the stick and not so politely kick it off      

rob2jim - 11 January 2014 09:41 AM

Thanks o_m_b - that's pretty much what we had figured out.

It was "the system" that directed me to the other post (as soon as it posted) as I guess the db search found that the subject lines of the two threads were similar.

The next question is can we put anything in our ap to seach for the other ap using the stick and not so politely kick it off

I'm not aware of any simple mechanism that finds out which process blocks the stick. I'm pretty sure that there are some Windows API calls to enumerate ANT USB sticks, associate them with .COM ports and find out which process has opened the port. But I've not ventured into this.

I'd guess that the major "suspect" to block the ANT USB stick is Garmin ANT Agent.
I've built a mechanism into my Windows application to search for running instances of the Garmin ANT Agent process and display these at the GUI. So the user can take action and end Garmin ANT Agent. I've even added a "brute force" button that simply kills the Garmin ANT Agent process, if the users clicks it.

Cheers,
OMB      

Hi,

What is the name of the proces?

greetz
Klaasjan