“Ready, Set, Go!” with the Fitbit SDK

[JonFitbit]

Hi everyone,

We’re excited for you to start playing around with the Fitbit SDK, available now as a Developer Preview!

To get started, you’ll want to set up your Fitbit Studio IDE and install the Fitbit OS Developer Beta Firmware (v27.30.2.8) onto your Fitbit Ionic smartwatch.

• Head over to our announcement on the Fitbit Developer Blog for how to get everything set up.
• Review the Fitbit OS Beta Release Notes, including current features and known issues.

Let’s have some fun today 🙂

[nevraw]

Just logged in to Studio on my Google Pixel to see what it's like (won't get home for about 3 hours and can't wait). 

Got a strange warning message in my Chrome browser telling me I should be using Chrome rather than the current browser!

[LiamFitbit]

Thanks for the report! I've logged this issue internally and we'll fix this in a future release.

[Anthoang]

Fitbit Studio looks good.  Nice touch with the sample projects.   Now just need the ionic to test the sample projects. 

[Bond-JamesBond]

Hi Jon,

I'm so excited to start playing with the SDK. Apparently, my Ionic will be here shortly so I can see for myself what data is available from the sensors.

In the meantime, could you please tell me what type of Heart Rate data comes through the Sensors API? Is it averaged/ aggregated Heart Rate, Beat-to-Beat Interval (RRi or BBi) displaying the time between each successive heart beat, or something else?

Any samples of the data would be fantastic to see!?

Thank you!

[SHGrade]

I got a nice surprise, my Ionic beat FedEx prediction by a day. I keep getting Server connection errors when attempting to activate the Developer Bridge from the watch(phone is connected fine). 

[Anthoang]

SHGrade, any luck in activating the Developer Bridge yet? 

[JoeSeaver]

I had to disconnect from phone via Bluetooth first

[allan175]

I got my developer bridge going ok, but my Ionic doesn't give me any notifications.

Did you reactivate your Bluetooth (and how)?

[Anthoang]

I am making the assumption the Ionic/Developer Bridge has to be on a Wifi network and not connected to the phone via bluetooth?  

[JonFitbit]

---

@Anthoang wrote:

I am making the assumption the Ionic/Developer Bridge has to be on a Wifi network and not connected to the phone via bluetooth?  

---

Correct.

[SHGrade]

yeah, that did not do it for me, turning off Bluetooth on phone and PC did
not change the cycle of "connecting to wifi, connecting to server,
connected to server, server connection error" did you mean disconnect from
the phone from the watch side?

[Anthoang]

I did get a custom watchface to appear on my Ionic.  But only after I disabled Bluetooth on my phone.  I got the same Ionic messages you got...  "connecting to server, connected to server, server connection error" several times before it was finally able to connect to the server.  I had to repeatedly press the "Developer Bridge" option on my Ionic.  At about the same time the ionic connected to the server, the Fitbit Studio recognized my Ionic device.  This took about 3-5 minutes.  

[JonFitbit]

We're making updates to improve the reliability and reporting regarding these connectivity issues. Sorry for your problems.

[jaytay579]

Stayed up waaaay too late last night playing with the SDK. Really enjoying it, but I'm hoping there will soon be a "duplicate project" option in Fitbit Studio? I'm trying to build incremental demos for my students, and right now there's a lot of copy-paste involved... Also, REALLY would love to be able to upload test programs via Bluetooth without needing Wifi, since our school's network won't authenticate the Fitbit Ionic...

[Nicome]

I have been playing with this for a few days now and the number of connection Error and disconnects from the bridge is insane.

I feel like I have to reconnect the watch to the bridge every single time I try my app. I'm also lucky if the connection works on the first try. It's slow an painful...

There is some good things about this platform but this might annoying to be a blocker in my opinion I can spend 20% of my time reconnecting my watch.

During the time it took me to write that message the watch went from "server connected" to "server connection error" this needs to be fixed.

If I didn't have so many issues I would like to request that the watch also doesn't disconnect unless it has been inactive for 15 minutes or manually disconnected.

[allan175]

That's not my experience at all! The developer connection seems pretty stable, although it can take a couple of attempts to actually get the first connection.

[Nicome]

Well I had a stretch of 1 hour or so right after I wrote that message where the watch stayed connected. I leave home so I disconnected it my self.

It was a first but let's hope that this becomes the new normal 🙂

[Zirke]

Hi Fitbit,

I have been playing around a little with Fitbit Studio. 2 things strike me as lacking. 1. absolutly NO code completion, at least some basic intelisense is needed, if you want us devs to do any serius work here. 2. Documentation that is easy to find and read, ALOT of your custom "classes", is not propperly documentet, do you want us to guess the function/prop names?!?

I would love the ability to just fetch a nuget / npm package at some point, and do dev via fullblown Visual Studio or VS Code, or pehaps Eclips if you guys arent MS fans. 

I see alot of potential, however after spending a cupple of hours, i have desitet, that your dev platform is not well enough documented and your IDE is still to basic, for me to attemple to do any serius work on it. 

One last thing. You call it JavaScript and the styling files is css, or is it? Basic CSS tags like text-align is just not there? 

Looking forward to see upcomming updates on this 😉

[qooApps]

@Zirke:

I agree: A bit of intellisense would help.

BUT: Fitbit has done a great job this year to build this environment. You cannot compare it to the big ones like Visual Studio or Eclipse, which are grown over many years with big development teams.

If you want to develop for wearables, then you have to reinvent the wheel, because you are not on a big desktop platform. You are limited in memory and power consumption. So forget all your ready made packages, build it on your own or use the system capabilities.
Learn to think smart and be inventive.

@Fitbit: 
Great Work!