How do I configure libfitbit?

Question

To use Ubuntu to upload FitBit data you need libfitbit which is available as ppa now. However I couldn't find configuration instructions. I also wonder if cuttlefish could help to get the same functionality as on OS/X: stick the stick in and get the upload going?

Solution 1

So I haven't actually been able to set up the fitbit using libfitbit, I had to use my roomates Mac to do the initial setup.

As for the "sticking in the stick and get the upload going", I included some udev rules in that package (I believe the original author wrote them), and it should just work when the fitbit is plugged in (once the initial setup has been done).

If it doesn't work, you just need to plug in, and run sudo start libfitbit_client

Solution 2

Thought I would add a couple of pointers for getting libfitbit running on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04:

1. The ppa listed above currently only has libfitbit for Ubuntu distributions up to Vivid. To tell Xenial to fetch the Vivid distro code, after running sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwayne18/fitbit, edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cwayne18-ubuntu-fitbit-xenial.list and change 'xenial' to 'vivid'. After that, sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install libfitbit should be able to find and install the package.

2. You need this patch (currently in a unmerged pull request) applied to the file /usr/share/libfitbit/fitbit_client.py (which you can do in an editor, remove the '-' line and add the '+' lines without the plusses) to avoid '403 Unauthorized' errors when the script tries to access the fitbit website.

   At line 136:

   -                res = urllib2.urlopen(url, urllib.urlencode(self.info_dict)).read()
   +                req = urllib2.Request(url, urllib.urlencode(self.info_dict))
   +                req.add_header("User-Agent", "FitBit Client")
   +                res = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
   

3. Xenial runs (by default) systemd instead of upstart, so needs a different startup file. Put the following text in a file named /lib/systemd/system/libfitbit.service

   [Unit]
   Description=Fitbit ANT uploader
   Documentation=https://github.com/openyou/libfitbit
   
   [Service]
   Type=simple
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /usr/share/libfitbit/fitbit_client.py
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target
   

   and start with sudo systemctl start libfitbit.

4. after plugging in the Fitbit Ultra base station and your Fitbit into it, and waiting a few seconds, you should be able to see the debug output of the script talking to and from the device and Fitbit website by running sudo journalctl -u libfitbit