meeTrainer


Turn your N9 into a full 

GPS sport-computer!


Track your sport and workout! Do it in real time! With meeTrainer you turn your magic Nokia N9 into a real sports computer.  meeTrainer uses your N9's bluetooth and gps receiver to give you all the exercise parameters you need,such as current heart rate, speed and caloric consumption, as well as total distance, elapsed time and much more. meeTrainer features a low consumption monitor mode, similar to the N9 standby screen, that allows you to always have everyting under control during the exercise.


Get it from Nokia Store



FEATURES

"What does meeTrainer have that I (and especially SportsTracker) don't?"


meeTrainer

  • Consumes very little battery while operating, allowing to track longer exercises
  • Monitors your exercise: by using the monitor window (see below), that can be always on on very low brightness for battery life purposes, you can always have your exercise information under your eyes
  • Can save your exercises data to CSV files, which are easy to import from other applications
  • Filters the gps data to provide more accurate distance and average speed information
  • Avoids the SportsTracker life-killer pop-up "turn internet connection on", appearing every 2 seconds if you have no internet connection (which is often the case during exercises)
  • Charts your workouts: you no longer need to upload your exercise somewhere in order to have a look at how you performed!


CURRENT LIMITATIONS

meeTrainer currently only supports  Polar Bluetooth HR chest belts (the only one i have).
If you are interested in using meeTrainer with other brands of bluetooth chest belts, please contact me.



CONTACT INFORMATION

For any question, suggestion, feature request, support request or help offers, please contact me via e-mail at THIS address.

For short comments that might be overlooked for a while, you may also try to use the commenting features of blogger.



DONATIONS


meeTrainer is a free application that I decided to develop on my spare time. If you like this program and you think it does a great job for you, or if you think it's a good start, but it would be great to have this or that feature added, you can also support the development by donating few money to the project 



SCREENSHOTS / INSTRUCTIONS









Some notes: meeTrainer includes an advanced brightness management option that is able to dim the display more than it would be normally possible, and save more energy. However, due to a bug in the software of the Nokia N9, it is not possible to easily disable the automatic regulation of the phone screen brightness.
Therefore, when using the advanced brightness management option, as soon as the light sensor detects a change in the ambient light, the screen brightness will be resetted automatically.

If you use the phone together with an armband, it's likely that the armband shield the light sensor, and you should be good to go.
Otherwise, to circumvent this problem, you may try something like this:



FUTURE WORK

There are already some plans for features that will or should be added to meeTrainer. Below a list of what I am already planning to work on. If you have other great ideas for meeTrainer, please write me!


  • Support more HR belts (if i manage to get them to test)
  • Offline maps for showing the trails (i will only support maps if they can be accessed also offline, either via a cache, or via a native Qt plugin for ovi maps)
  • Charting and graphing of saved exercises
  • More advanced GPS data filtering
  • Step counting
  • Gpx exporting 
  • Limits and limits alert
  • Routes and best times
  • Web interface and cloud storage for the exercises


CHANGELOG

Version 0.2.5
- Support for Zephyr HxM chest belt

Version 0.2.2
- Support for SportsTracker HRM chest belt
- Workouts list page improved: now with monthly summaries
- Workout detail page improved: more information provided and charting of the time series data
- Settings page reworked. 
- Hr zones added (not showing in the workout details yet, though, but the information is there)
- Plenty of bugfixes and core rework

Version 0.1.0
- initial release


HISTORY OF meeTrainer

I want to share with you how meeTrainer was born, because i find it interesting.
This april (2012), after about 12 years of yeoman service, i decided that it was time to switch from my old Nokia 6510 (made in Finland, still working) to something smarter. Not because i really had a compelling need for it. 
In fact my sister got a good android phone last summer, which i fiddled around with for quite a while, ending up with the thought "Cool. So what? Cant really do much with it..". 
But this february, a friend (by the way, thanks, Tero!) showed me this cool N9 , which is really almost a pocket linux, it's probably the most beautiful smartphone ever made, it has the most amazing user interface i've ever seen and used on a handset, it takes really good pictures for being a phone, and, above all, it is still made in Finland! (and it will probably be the last smartphone ever made outside asia, at least for a while). So i thought that this was really my last chance, and i bought one (in fact two, as one has been stolen).

One of the things i always wanted to do, once i had a smartphone, was using SportsTracker.

After having done a lot of sport in my teens using polar hr monitors, I really enjoy monitoring my workouts, and, being N9 a Nokia phone, I expected it to have a fully featured version of SportsTracker (if you didnt know, SportsTracker is a Nokia spin-off).
But real life is always different from what one imagines. And in fact, the SportsTracker version for N9 sucks hard (my opinion. But if you every tried it, then you know. If you havent, then try and see).
After some days of disappointment, i started to think how to sort this situation out, and i came up with an idea. "Well, maybe i can check if SportsTracker has a job opening for Qt/MeeGo". They had. One. So i decided to apply. I've done something with Desktop Qt, i never developed anything for smartphones before, i had no idea how to deal with gps and bluetooth at all, i had no idea what protocol do these bluetooth HRM belts speak.
So i offered SportsTracker to work for free, in exchange of some crush course on how to deal with the stuff. They would have got their work done for free. I would have got my SportsTracker N9 app fixed, and learnt how to do mobile apps. But hey, they never ever came back at me.

So, the end of the story is.. i went for it on my own, during my spare time off work. It even turned out to be something relatively easy and quick to do (as most things in life, once we overcome the initial fear of the unknown). It has also been a fun way to learn how to create mobile apps.

However, meeTrainer has stil lots of space for improvement, and lots of bugs that should be fixed, and my plan is to keep working on it on my spare time, so that it will become even better.As you can see above, there is already a ToDo list. 
But i still hope that you like it already, and that you can make good use of it, as much as i do. 
And if you have suggestions or bug report, dont hesitate and contact me. 
Also, if you want to support me developing this application, you can use the Donate button on this page to donate a few money to the project 





23 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very nice app Paulo but can you please make the distance display to 2 decimal places which will be more useful for walking and jogging? Thanks and keep up the good work!

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  3. Hello Kenny, i am considering to add this as an option. Soon there will be a new release with a number of improvements and new features, so i can try to have this too.
    Do you use it together with an heart rate belt, by the way?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for adding this option Paolo. I'm waiting for your new version to be in Ovi store. I actually use MeeTrainer for walking and jogging without any heart rate belt. It's beats SportsTracker annoying data request every 2 secs anytime.

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  4. Congratulations for this excellent app!

    A question, I am not able to convert the csv file to something known (gpx, kml...). I tried Poiedit and some other programs without success. Any hint?

    Thanks again for your great app.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Jordi, well in principle the CSV file is custom, so the bad news is that if you want to convert it to gpx, you should do it yourself.
    The good news is that i reworked all the workout management, and i should be able to export to gpx relatively easily as soon as i have time to read how the format is defined :)

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  6. Hi Paolo, thanks for your your answer. I will try to do it myself, looking forward for your update ;-)

    Congratulations for your efficient filtering of GPS data.

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  7. Thanks :) if you can afford to wait a little, it's likely that meeTrainer will include an export to gpx functionality for saved exercises :)

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  8. Hi
    Now when we have such a nice program, it would be nice to have some more things to help trainig. I've been searching app witch would help in iterval training, so i could make for example rule to 30-20-10 workout.
    I't would be somtihing like warmup distance from gps, then beep, 30 seconds and beep, then wait 20 seconds and beep, then 10 secods and repeat it 4 times, wait 120 seconds, repeat whole thig twice. Then cooldown distance from gps. That would be very impressive, when you could make and share workout strategies.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi, that's indeed a great idea, and some other people asked for that too.
    I think it is something that should be added relatively soon, in one of the next releases. Probably not in the next one, though. for that one i still have in the queue map support, better filtering ,more graphs, beeping, step counting and exporting to gpx, if i make it to add that too :)
    But thanks again for your idea! i think its great that the community is sharing ideas, in this way it will be finally possible to create a sport computer application that does what we want :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hi, your app is one of my favourite one. It's great to see people support our beloved N9, even if Nokia seems to consider it as a dead device.
    I've seen that in your .csv files that GPS coordinates are saved, therefore can we expect in a future release to have an offline map of our previous training? That would be great.
    This is for me the biggest thing I'm waiting for: See the track of my training (since I'm walking, I'm changing it every day).

    Hope to see a future release very soon :)

    ReplyDelete
  11. GPX export and Nokia offline maps view would be great.

    GPX format seems very simple (at least on a basic level). You could use this template:
    http://pastebin.com/EUJgusDw
    You could have the whole header static (even User Name don't seem too important) and then just add multiple trkpt in a single trkseg.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Here is a short GPX example which I successfully imported to sports-tracker:
    http://pastebin.com/dRSycY6Y

    During import only desc was used, but the user (me in this case) is able to change it during import anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi Paolo,

    Thanks again for this great app, I use it when walking, bicycling and also when skiing!

    Would it be possible to have a recording intervall of 1 or 2 seconds instead of 5? This could help to have a more accurate track when going quickly (curves in bicycling and mainly skiing).

    Cheers, Jordi

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  14. Hi Jordi, sorry for having disappeared for a while.
    In fact i had already a version with this option for you. However i had to stop the development for a while, and now that i restarted, i realized that a major reengineering is necessary for adding many more features :)
    I am planning to roll out the next version by the end of February, but it might also get delayed to mid March, depending on a couple of things.
    Hope you can wait. There will be changes also in the file format, but automatic conversion is already happening.
    As for the gpx format, i eventually dropped the idea of using it, because it is limited, in its standard form. I should extend the schema, but then it wouldnt be fully compatible with existing gpx software, so i think it's better to use a flexible file format, that is easy to convert to gpx, too, if needed.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hi Paolo, Thanks for your answer.
    Of course I can wait for all of these features ;-)
    Regards, Jordi

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  16. Hi Paolo,

    Any news, regarding this great app?

    I look forward to try the improvements you planned...

    Regards, Jordi

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hello Jordi,

    I'm unfortunately still working on it.. The problem was that my new design was perhaps a little too ambitious, and i have some problems getting through one last part.
    I hope i can fix it soon..
    I'm sincerely sorry for the discomfort this delay causes :(

    gtx
    Paolo

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  18. Thanks for your answer, Paolo. I will wait ;-)

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  19. Hi Paolo,

    I bought my girlfriend an N9, and now, with your app, I will buy her a Polar HR-sensor. I have questions in two regards:

    1. Is there any recommended HR-sensor; e.g. which one do you use? Maybe there is only one Polar type, or maybe all are compatible?

    2. You mention integration with OVI-maps. Is it possible to integrate with OSM? Could I perhaps help you on that, some time in the future?

    Best,
    Morten Lind.

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  20. Hello Morten, N9 is still a great choice :)

    Regarding HR Sensor, I personally own a Polar bluetooth chest belt (old model).
    meeTrainer at the moment supports also the first version of the sports tracker chest belt (i am not sure how many different models of that brand are on the market).

    However, if i had to make a choice, i would go for the zephyr belt, which has an open source protocol, and i will do my best to support it in the next release (i really hope to make it happen soon...)

    Anyway, the polar support wont go away, so that would be a safe choice.

    Regarding the maps, right now i gave up on offline ovi maps, as i seem to be unable to reverse the format.
    I am therefore planning to include some OSM plugin that supports caching. If you have experience with that, i would appreciate some exchange with you :)

    I found a couple of plugins but i havent yet dig into that to integrate them into meeTrainer

    greetings,
    Paolo

    ReplyDelete
  21. Hi Paolo,

    Except for low battery capacity, a (single-core) CPU on the weak side, and a very temperature sensitive display, the N9 is a great phone. Now I am awaiting the coming of a Samsung with Tizen :-)

    Wonderful tip about the Zephyr sensor. It is, however, somewhat more expensive than the Polar ones, but I will try and find one here in Norway. The open source/specification makes it well worth investing in IMO.

    My question regarding the Polar ones was more specifically if you use a Wearlink+ BT or an H7. I suppose it must be the WearLink+ BT since it is the only one advertised using BT; though I think I read that the H7 uses BT too.

    Lastly, I have no experience with embedding an OSM viewer, but I suggest ripping out or porting the Tracking view code from Marble Mobile if that would be possible. I have often been wondering where to start integrating OSM and for what purpose, and it seems that now I may have found it :-)

    Please contact me on moli _at_ jabber.dk, if you are on Jabber/XMPP, if we should talk about this some time.

    Best,
    Morten Lind.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Hi Morten, i checked my belt. It says on the back "Polar iWL", i assume is the Wearlink BT, the one compatible with symbian phones.

    Thanks for the tip about marble mobile. I have already some code from a couple of other projects (cacheme and two stand alone location plugins), but i will definitely check this up :)

    I dont really use jabber (especially now that gtalk is getting disconnected), but mail me, we can find some other ways :)
    gtx
    Paolo

    ReplyDelete