Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch, that I use to record running data; which I upload to Strava. I recently had to get this working with Arch, and I wanted to record the steps required; both for posterity, and in case I need to do it again.

To get it working, you need to install garminplugin from the AUR. It has a dependency on garmintools so you need to install that manually as well, as makepkg doesn’t know how to. You then need to rmmod garmin_gps, and blacklist it.

At this point, you can run:

garmin_get_info -v

If you get back a gobbet of xml, then all is well; and you should be able to upload data to Strava or Garmin Connect. If you get a permission error, then you need to add a udev rule. Create a file named /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules, and enter in it:

ATTRS{idVendor}=="091e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="666"

(If you are using a different device, then you’ll need the appropriate vendor or product ids). If you reload the udev config, you should be able to access your device.

UPDATE: this has stopped working for me; I can still get the xml off the watch but the browser plugin doesn’t work (on Strava anyway). I’ll update this if I ever get it working again.