Owning my Garmin data

Over the last month, I took some time to build a tiny WordPress plugin that fetches data from my Garmin Connect platform and displays it on my website. Currently the workflow only pulls activity data from the platform – which was my focus for this month. With modifications to the python script, I think this can be extended further to fetch any type of data from the platform. Here’s a rundown of the publishing workflow so far:

• Bluetooth Sync data from the watch to the Garmin connect portal. This is manual since I see no point in having Bluetooth turned on 24/7
• Edit the activity in the Garmin connect app for say activity title, activity type or just add some more context to the workout
• A cron job runs on my website twice every week to trigger this python script in my WordPress plugin. I made slight modifications to the script so as to tie-in with my workflow.
• The python script connects to my Garmin connect account, pulls the latest three activities and saves them as JSON files on my server.
• The garmin-stats page when requested by a client, parses the JSON file for each activity and displays the content in a predefined format. There’s also a provision to publish a specific activity as an individual post. If I’m logged in WordPress, a ‘Publish this’ button is displayed for activities that have not been posted yet.

• Currently I am assigning all of these posts to the ‘workout’ category and I’ve disabled these from showing up on my main RSS feed. These posts however do show up on my micro-posts page.

To-do’s:

• The script currently triggers a ‘Garmin login alert’ email for my account. Most likely because of locale settings. Would be good to mute these.
• The plugin code currently dynamically generates the summary page on 200+ JSON files. I’ll probably limit this to just 20 or so.
• Fetch non activity data too.
• Maps, charts, visualizations!
• Always scope for cosmetic tweaks!

Micro updates:

• May 7, 2021 14:31
• May 11, 2021 19:19