Openambit

Openambit makes your computer the Free (as in Freedom) conduit between your Ambit watch and Suunto's Movescount site (if you want it to go that far). It enables you to get your hard-earned "move" log data off your watch and onto your computer. And if you really want it to, Openambit will pump that data into the cloud where Big Data can crunch it to pieces and analyze your moves to shreds.

Modules

Openambit includes the following modules:

src/libambit

a library that let's you computer communicate with your Ambit watch

src/openambit

a Qt based GUI application to get data off your watch and push it to Suunto's Movescount site

src/example

a very simple command-line application that reports on your watch's support status, and, if your watch is supported, battery charge and a summary of the moves on your watch.

tools

contains a few utilities that people thought useful. One compares Openambit's XML log files with those from Moveslink2 and another converts the XML to GPX

wireshark_dissector

a Wireshark packet dissector to help reverse engineer the Ambit device protocol by picking your packet captures apart.

Source Or Binary?

Let's be clear, building from the latest revision in the repository is not quite for the faint of heart. You need a development environment, make sure build requirements are met, actually build (doh!) and pray things work as intended. And if worse comes to worst, you might even brick your Ambit watch and turn it into a paperweight.

Of course, we try our damnedest (and often put our own Ambits to the test) to prevent that absolutely worst-case scenario but there are no guarantees.

Distribution provided binary packages, such as provided by Debian and Ubuntu are normally built from reasonably well tested sources. As in, it probably will not turn your Ambit into a paperweight. That might just meet your needs. For other distributions, have a look at OSWatershed.org, or hit your favourite search engine.

If you cannot find binaries that meet your needs (not that unlikely at present), you can compile from one of the source code archives on our release page (or the corresponding git tag). That would also be on the safe side.

As a last resort, or if you're a developer type, go ahead and build from the latest, greatest "bleeding edge" version on the repository's master branch.

Requirements

In order to build Openambit from source you need a couple of tools and libraries. To begin with, you will need cmake, make and C and C++ compilers. You will need C and C++ libraries, Qt4, libqjson and zlib as well as one of libudev and libusb-1.0. For all these libraries you will also need their header files (typically provided in *-dev or *-devel packages).

Build Procedure

The simplest way to build from source is by means of the build.sh script. It will build all components needed to use Openambit. Any command-line arguments you specify are passed on to cmake. That means you can set up a "Debug" build with

cd /path/to/your/clone/of/openambit
./build.sh -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Developer and otherwise inquisitive types may want to build some of the extras that are included. To do so

cd /path/to/your/clone/of/openambit
BUILD_EXTRAS=1 ./build.sh

You can run the applications you built without installing as follows

./run.sh                     # runs the GUI application
./run.sh openambit           # runs the GUI application
./run.sh ambitconsole        # runs the example application

If you are only interested in building a selected module, you can just use cmake directly. For example, if all you really want to build is libambit and nothing else, you could (for example)

cd /path/to/your/clone/of/openambit
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake ../src/libambit
make

Actually, you can also build everything directly with cmake. The following ought to work

cd /path/to/your/clone/of/openambit
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake ..
make

Install Procedure

If you have built from source with build.sh, you can install with install.sh. This only installs the openambit application and the libambit library it needs. When you have built only selected parts, simply install them with

cd /path/to/your/build/directory
sudo make install

If you built directly with cmake, installation is simply

cd /path/to/you/clone/of/openambit
cd _build
sudo make install

To enable the Wireshark dissector, just copy the ambit.so file to your ~/.wireshark/plugins/ directory. You can also put a symbolic link there pointing to the build result so your next wireshark run will use the latest, greatest(?) version.