07.18.06

I’m an Apple whore

Posted in General at 11:42 pm

This should come as no surprise to, anyone… and it should be obvious that I couldn’t resisit getting an iPod nano and the Nike+iPod kit. I’m not really much of a runner, but it works for walking and was only $29. (Well, and the excuse to buy a nano, but don’t tell Aoife.) Plus I sorta have a goal of being able to run a 10 minute mile… not much of one, but that was the “fitness” test in middle school I could never quite manage.

Anyway, I just discovered it doesn’t work on an elliptical, like they say. I even tried rigging it up to the pedal and it didn’t help. I played around with the sensor and it seems to register at the extension of the foot, when running. I can think of some mechanical ways to rig an elliptcal to simulate that, but I don’t think they’d be very sturdy. I might just have to buy a second one to rip apart. Supposedly when you have two sensor/receiver pairs iTunes can differentiate them and associate different Nike+ accounts, so presumably there’s some data on the iPod that would let you differentiate between the sensor you use for running and the one rigged up to the elliptical (in theory).

Speaking of the data on the iPod… it’s plain old XML and there’s some interesting stuff in there. Particularly interesting is this:


<extendedDataList><extendedData dataType="distance" intervalType="time" intervalUnit="s" intervalValue="10">0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0228, 0.0228, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313</extendedData>
</extendedDataList>
</code>


Essentially says to me that it’s keeping track of the total distance traveled every 10 seconds. Must be how the data gets translated into the spiffy graph. There’s also a hex string in there for the calibration… presumably you could save that out and substitute it for a different calibration profile if you did manage to make it work with an elliptical after calibrating it for the elliptical (something I didn’t do).

Also, vaguely interesting when using the elliptical it will claim there is no data after two minutes and “press center to continue workout”. After that happens twice it seems to give up, so you can continue to use it as a time tracker, if nothing else.

Now off to look at the tcpdump of the data iTunes sent to Nike for me.

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