I bought a Garmin Forerunner 255 watch that I want to use only with Gadgetbridge. There is an old software version on the watch and I want to update it and I don’t want to connect it with Garmin Connect or Garmin Express app?

I have looked for the possibility to do an “offline” update but have not found it. Maybe the community will help?

      • cyrl@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I’ve just spent the last week with Gadgetbridge for my Forerunner 265.

        Previously I had Garmin Connect installed on a separate Android user profile with Google Play Services enabled (GrapheneOS). I would only go in there once a week or so and look at the Garmin info as it synced over.

        Gadgetbridge is working pretty well - the great majority of everything I actually cared about viewing is accessible. I also have an always on BT connection for notifications and music controls which I was missing out on before.

        That said, there are a few drawbacks

        • Garmin presents the date better.

        Gadgetbridge often uses bar charts for time-series data where Garmin uses a line chart. e.g. Stress is a series of 1px thin vertical lines with colour to indicate bands. Garmin’s single line which swaps colour is far clearer.

        • GPS data is not overlaid on a map

        Its easy enough to open the GPX file in an external map viewer, but you can’t see its alongside heart rate etc and the track won’t be heatmapped for speed as in Garmin.

        Personally, I’m willing to live with these compromises for the privacy, certainly for another few months trial.

        As it seems easy to setup a regular export of Gadgetbridge data, I might make it a coding project to implement better visualisations in Python.