I recently spent some time getting Garmin, my concept2 and intervals.icu setup and thought I would capture them here as a reference for other users.
Also, there are a few paper cuts which I might use this to capture them all and maybe link to specific threads (feature requests maybe?) for each one if we get that far!
Couple of different ways to skin this cat so I’ll give a quick overview.
- directly connect your concept2 to garmin device, use indoor row, sync your garmin account to intervals.
pro’s: pretty much just works
con’s: it’s doesn’t pull across drag factor
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forget your garmin device, record your row to the ergdata app, sync that to garmin sync that to intervals (actually does this work? I think I read on here that there is a garmin API restriction that limits intervals pulling data from third party apps…I never tried it.
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connect your concept2 to your garmin device, use the AKRowing datafield, sync your garmin accoun to intervals
pro’s: pull’s in drag factor
con’s: breaks a few things, namely your garmin device can only maintain one connection to the concept2, so the datafield takes that connection, so the native indoor row app doesn’t collect pace, power etc data from the ergo, but the datafield does. This is where it get’s kinda annoying with intervals, because the “native” datafield in the fit file is blank, but the secondary datafields are there with the data, just not read across by default (except power??? who know’s David probably).
Ok, now you ask a great question, green, who cares about drag factor, seriously, just check in on the screen every now and again mate it doesn’t change. And you would be correct however, I had this stupid idea to see if drag factor drifts much with ambient temperature (changing air density) so I wanted to test that with some quick and dirty, ambient temp, drag factor charts because I’m a full nerd and wasn’t able to because of how garmin pulls in the data…so here I am.
So current state, is 3) from above, with pace, power, drag factor being charted.
what’s kinda jank.
total distance. I can manually upload it, but it’s not reading directly when the fit file is being processed.
This field in the fit file:
total distance(m): 0.00
but the garminIQ one:
Distance IQ (m): 10,006.00
Feature request one: allow the user to set a hierarchy for reading fields from a fit file
Pace: similar to above, the fit file has nothing for a native speed/pace field, but there is one coming from the IQ field.
Workaround: use the custom activity stream feature to set up a pace stream (one gotcha here is you need to change a setting in the AK rowing app to read in mins/500 (it actually changes the fit file to m/s but whatever) instead of km/h) but otherwise this works, the only annoying thing is that intervals won’t capture the pace curves (like it does for HR and power when doing this.
feature request two: allow the user to set a hierarchy for streams (is this the right word???) in the fit file.
feature request three: rationalise the way the user can edit charts. I count three methods:
- on the fit page, you can hit the popup down the bottom, and then edit icon on each chart (i like this the most)
- on the activity page, for some charts you can click on the axis on the left?
- on the activity page, for custom streams you click charts, custom streams, then you get a dialog pop up to get to the edit button
The chart editing on the activity page had me spinning for a bit and ended up using the googles so, yeh kinda just a papercut.
Cadence: you can get cadence data from the AKrowing IQ field and directly from the garmin native fit file fields, they don’t match for whatever reason at high rates so…kind of a gotcha for anybody who is following down this path, just use the custom stream to chart the IQ field one and look at both, one of them is normally correct.
Stroke Length: can’t get this working with AKRowing connect IQ at the moment and it did work with the garmin native indoor rowing app, the numbers from the AKRowing field are meant to be in (m) but getting actuals like 1.4, even if that was out by a factor of 10 it’s not correct so…something is foobar here.
Power: power just works, so NFI why that’s the case but thumbs up 
Next step to fix this is lean the scripting language the site uses and then do something with the distance stream and the cadence stream but that is tots a saturday morning over coffee job.
Also, sick site, really <3 the layout, the charts, the hint text, the inbuilt references, the ease of use, how powerful the tooling is. Place is sick.