ThinkRunning

I have been meaning to give this a try for a while now and thought that it would be good to share it having been reminded about it by a friend recently who wanted to know if there was an easy way of achieving this.

I tried several methods using various software and driver configurations. This was the only method that worked in the end. Other methods they are very complicated and don’t work reliably.

You need to use the latest way of communicating via libusb the usb library for Linux.

Depending upon the installer you will have to open a command terminal or use your system installer – this is the preferred way because dependencies are automatically resolved.

I used Yum and the command for that is:

yum install libusb

Here is what you might see in the terminal window. If so then you need not worry, you are already using libusb. All that remains is to tell your machine that it’s ok to “hot plug” it by creating a rule for it here:

sudo mousepad /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules

Copy and paste this into the newly created file:

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

Save and restart. This should work with TurtleSport. I tried numerous others none of which worked. Please note that I used mousepad that comes with linpus but you can use whatever editor happens to be on your system. I use vi usually but some people find it a bit tricky to use when they are not used to it.

Now you need to download TurtleSport…

http://turtlesport.sourceforge.net/EN/home.html

Copy the file turtlesport-linux-0.1.12.tar into a convenient directory. I created one called /opt/turtle

Copy the .tar file into it by typing the following command…

cp /tmp/turtlesport-linux-0.1.12.tar /opt/turtle

The /tmp directory just happens to be where my browser downloads files. You need to use whatever directory your downloads is set to.

To open the tar file make sure you have the terminal window open in the directory you need to be in by typing the following command:

cd /opt/turtle

Now you need to ‘untar’ the file by entering the following command into the terminal window:

sudo tar -xvf turtlesport-linux-0.1.12.tar

You will see a list of files as above that have been uncompressed into the directory where the tarfile is.

Now to run the application. I plan to tidy this up and show how to put an icon on the desktop. For now I will simply show how you can start the application and upload your Garmin data.
Open up a terminal window if you need to and type:

cd /opt/turtle

then type:

ls

The ls command should show you the list of files you decompressed into the directory.

Now enter the following command to run the application…

./turtlesoft

Here is what it looks like in the terminal window…

Within a few seconds Turtlesport will run and you should see the nice user interface as shown below…

Now to upload some Garmin data. Plug in your cradle and Garmin 305 to the usb port on your machine. To star uploading you need to click the first green icon under the file menu on Turtlesoft to start the process as below…

After the upload has finished just click “Save” to save the data and it will appear. If you don’t see it, click the relevant date on the calendar to the left.

That is all for now because I am tired. I will post details on how to export a Training Centre (.tcx) file and upload it to GarminConnect where you can share it with the world if you so wish.

For now, maybe you could go and sign up for a free GarminConnect account?

This article was inspired by and uses some of the information contained in this forum here Thanks guys.