Garmin and Home Assistant

Today I want to talk to you about the Garmin integration with Home Assistant Since there are some things that can be interesting, I’m sure it gives you some ideas that make you spend money and sell the Apple Watch… or not, we’ll see.

I’ve told you once that I’m a running fan. or the running, or the lifelong footing, as you call it. I go out to jogging 4 or 5 times a week and, although I’m not very fond of racing, every year I usually have on the calendar the Marathon of Valencia and some other Media Marathon before to see how I go about sensations and training.

I’ve had all the Apple Watch that have come out and all the high-end Garmin from the Phenix 3.. Every year I was buying the Apple Watch thinking that that year was going to be the perfect watch with a super polished smart part and a sports part that was improving over the years… until months later I realized that you can’t run a marathon setting on the battery left to the watch, that the training with Garmin gave me a lot more information… and I returned to the most complete Garmin there was at that time. So until in September Apple presented the next Apple Watch and began the circle again.

When the Apple Watch Ultra came out and his 3-day battery promise, it looked like it was finally the perfect watch.. I bought it the same day he showed up. It has new metrics, estimates the power, an incredible screen and 3 days of battery that stays in 2 if you run out every day… but in return you have a clock always connected because it has LTE If something happens at home and you get called in the middle of an exit, you can take the call or answer by message, etc. I ran with the Ultra the Marathon of Valencia last year and at a time of physical and mental bassist I’ve been texting with my wife and a friend who’s pushing me.

Rum literally during those hard miles… and all without carrying the phone, of course.

I don’t want to take the phone anymore.. It’s weight, and it subtract the speed! But in addition to that, since I have a Pro Max (although this year is the last, we’ll talk about that…), it becomes uncomfortable to wear in the belt where I carry the keys and the water. Nor am I to take postage photos on each output, so the solution of being connected by LTE is perfect. It allows me to be connected to the family if something happens and it allows me to be connected to the world if something happens to me, if I have a fall, I bend an ankle or I have a heart attack.

The point is, I had been happy with my Apple Watch Ultra 1 for a year and a half, but a few weeks ago I went out for a long run of 18km… and when I came home I had 38% battery. I had it loaded the night before to be almost 100%. That morning when I got up I had 95% after all night monitoring the dream, so I went out to run with the AirPods and the Apple Watch connected by LTE to go listen to podcasts that is what I always do, and after those 2 hours of jogging quietly, when I came home I had 38% battery And I thought it wasn’t enough to run a marathon since my time is around 4 hours… <

/ strong > and I thought I had to sell it and change the clock. I didn’t think about disactivating LTE, not listening to podcasts downloading them directly, not using the AirPods, in the messages that probably came in that time… no, I thought I wasn’t going to last a marathon and I couldn’t be waiting for that while I was running the marathon.

A few months ago I was testing the one that’s supposed to be the most modern Garmin clock, the Epix 2 Pro with AMOLED screen and up to 10 days of battery duration… and I really didn’t like it! The Apple Watch was much better, the battery didn’t last 10 days or so even if it could last a week perfectly… but it looked old, an obsolete software that hasn’t changed for a thousand years but now in colors… that’s right, a little off. It didn’t last me 48 hours and I returned to the Apple Watch Ultra the sea of joy.

This time it’s been different, I bought the Garmin Forerunner 965. which is the highest model of the Forerunner range. For those of you who are not on, the Forerunner range is supposed to be dedicated to people who run, nothing and go on a bike, even for triathlon because it tells you times in transitions, but it is not a multisport watch to use like the Fenix or the Epix that have all the sports that you can think of with their metrics, golf courses stored, nautical miles if you are sailing, you can dive almost to the Marian pit… However, The 965 has a more modern firmware with animations on its AMOLED screen, living colors…

Rong > and I’m delighted with it. It’s true that I had to give up the «smart» part. because they can’t be compared. Garmin doesn’t even allow a message to be answered with a predefined message from ‘I’m running, I’ll call you later’. If you have your cell phone nearby and you get a message, you can read it… and get your cell phone out to answer. With the Apple Watch you can do anything: respond with a predefined message in 2 click, dictate a message with the voice, write on the small keyboard that comes out on screen… and not just for messages, you can do it with Whatstapp, with telegram, answer an email, take a call and speak directly by the watch… all that

without carrying the phone. And of all that I’ve forgotten now… and I have to tell you that– some way my stress level has lowered since I was trying to answer those messages as I was running, sometimes he had to stare where he wasn’t, sometimes he didn’t take the dictation well because he had his breath agitated, and so on. Now that I don’t get them… one less problem. The one who writes to me will have to wait for me to get home. I’ve won some disconnection. We must always see the glass half full.

Well, after all this stuff and what we know after seventy-so many episodes of podcast, you’ve come up with an idea that was a rather intensive Apple Watch user, not just to control some of the House things or turn on / off some light both manually and with Siri. And I had to integrate the Garmin one way or another.

In Home Assistant there are 2 different integrations.

Integration with Garmin Connect

On one hand We have the integration of Home Assistant with our Garmin account. It reminds me of what can be done with the integration of BMW Connect that I have already told you. It basically connects to our cloud account and gets some data from what we see in Garmin Connect or the clock app.. This is a bullshit, I don’t want to have to get into Home Assistant to see the calories I’ve burned today or the steps I’ve been carrying, but these days I’ve been thinking of some things that may be interesting.

For starters, remember that the Garmin Connect app notifications are quite basic, so you’re not gonna alert us to all the parameters that leave a set range even if you show it in red on screen. However, with the integration into Home Assistant, I can collect the data from the sleep score and receive it through a Home Assistant notification every day at 8. Or I can even make the dynamic notification and receive it 10 minutes after turning off the Garmin alarm., since one of the parameters it does publish is the time of the alarm, both the past and the next.

Another of the automations I’ve made sends me a notification through Home Assistant when my body battery drops by 20%.

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If your alarm clock is controlled by Home Assistant and, for example, it turns on the lamp and lifts the blinds at a certain time, we can pick up the sleep hours and, in case we lack sleep and our sleep score is very low, it will delay all this a little, 20 minutes for example. Dynamic way without you doing anything.

Or if you usually control the water you drink during the day and You haven’t had enough to drink today, you can have me send you a notification. O turn on the bathroom heater one hour after you turn off the Garmin alarm. as long as it’s within a range of hours as it means you’re up to run. It is true that with the Apple Watch we can put other parameters into the condition as is my location, but the result can be quite similar.

The data is not refreshed in real time, so we cannot make an automation so that we can be told for example if our pulsations are strangely high… It is possible that when that information is synchronized we have already been given the heart attack, but that notification we can get directly from the clock, obviously.

For the moment I have stayed with the body battery notifications that usually come to me at the last hour of the afternoon as I go out to run in the morning and with the sleep score that tells me to adjust my departure in the morning according to whether I have rested enough to get a series of changes in the rhythm of those that you end up with tunnel effect in the look or whether it is preferable that I leave that for another day and just go out to trot a little bit because my dream has not been repairing. I also have a notification for when my usual slippers reach the 800 km that is when I should replace them. This information is also available in Garmin Conne

ct but we don’t get a notification to use, so not so bad.

With the BMW Connect integration I’ll tell you about another day I do similar things. As my integration has the services of BMW Connect, every time I use it synchronizes with the services of BMW a lot of things: telemetry, autonomy, last exits, kilometers to the next review… and you can do some things like that your Home Assistant alarm machine raises you 15 minutes earlier because it has seen that you have the bike in reserve and so it gives you time to put gas before going to the ofi, so you save the scare when you start it and think ‘fuck, I didn’t remember that I left it in reserve’

ConnectIQ app for the watch

On the other hand we have widget integrations or applications that run on the clock. These apps can be downloaded through Garmin Connect IQ and there are several related to Home Assistant.

After trying several, the one I like most is Garmin Home Assistant (app). This app allows us to customize on a screen all the data we want to display, can be a switch to turn on or off a device, temperature information or a clickable button to run an action or script. Anything. I have put on the switch to turn on or turn off my table lamp, the button to run the scene that opens the portal, another switch to turn off all the lights of the house at once and the Cas average temperature data

a.

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Let’s say that does not give you direct access to all the devices you have in Home Assistant but you have to go by choosing them one by one. You can get them all if you want, but it’s kind of a ‘direct access’ you review the most.

Let’s see, there are things that are missing to polish… for example, Although the 965 has Wi-Fi connection, this application is connected to the phone by bluetooth. If you don’t have your phone nearby, it doesn’t matter if you can connect to the Wi-Fi because it doesn’t work. They say it’s because the wi-fi connectivity consumes a lot of battery, it still makes us lower the battery from 10 days to 8… a tragedy.

In addition, if we want to just get into that application, let’s see the data in real time without having to wait a couple of seconds for them to cool, we can activate the option, but they also let us know that it consumes a lot of battery. I’m sure we’re going down from 8 days to 6. A clock with 144 hours of battery is virtually unacceptable. And you’re serious, huh? I promise you I’m running out every day, the weekend I’ve played the two-day paddle monitoring the activity, other days I do force exercises, I have the alarms in the Garmin, I put the water I’m drinking, the always–on screen always on to the top of the glow… and it’s over 1 week without being loaded.

It is possible that in a few weeks, when they present the Apple Watch Ultra 3, I fall in love and convince myself that it is the final watch… but I’m already telling you that I’m very happy with the Forerunner 965 and the Advanced Notifications I’ve configured through Home Assistant.