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About SportsTracker

SportsTracker is an application for people who want to record their sporting activities. It is not bound to a specific kind of sport, the user can create categories for all sport types such as cycling, running, swimming or tennis.

The main advantage is a good overview of your exercises and you can easily create diagrams and statistics for specific time ranges and sport types.

All the application data is stored in XML files. So it should be easy to access it with other tools or to write importers and exporters for other applications.

If you own a heartrate monitor with a computer interface you can display the recorded exercise files and evaluate the diagrams with the integrated PolarViewer application.
You can organize them by attaching the recorded files to the exercise entries. When adding new exercises you can import the data from the recorded exercise files.

PolarViewer supports Polar and CicloSport heartrate monitors. This is the current compatibility list (other monitors might work too, but I can't test them, user feedback is welcome):

Polar S610(i) (tested)
Polar S710(i) (tested)
Polar S720i (tested)
Polar S725 (tested)
Polar S625x (tested, HRM files only)
Polar S410 (tested, HRM files only)
Polar RS200SD (tested)
CicloSport HAC4 (tested, initial support)

It's also possible to view HRM exercise files (downloaded with the Polar Software for Windows).

SportsTracker itself is not able to download the exercise files from the heartrate monitor. You need to use one of these tools for it:

's710' for many Polar models (S6XX, S7XX, ...), at least version 0.19 URL: http://daveb.net/s710
'rs200-decoder' for Polar RS200 URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rs200-decoder
'HAC4Linux' for CicloSport HAC4 URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hac4linux

Users of Polar S725 monitors needs to keep the default settings (80 - 160) of the 'Exercise Heartrate Range Summary'. This is right now the only known method to detect the S725 exercise file type, because it needs different parsing compared to other S7XX models (this is not necessary for parsing HRM files of S725).

Requirements

SportsTracker is a .NET application written in C using the Gtk toolkit. It was developed and tested with the Mono implementation of .NET. Other .NET runtimes might work too, but I have not tested them.

You need the following tools/libraries for running SportsTracker:

Mono >= 1.1.13 (from http://www.mono-project.com)
libgdiplus > 1.1.13 (from http://www.mono-project.com)
Gtk# >= 2.4.0 (from http://www.mono-project.com)

If you want to download exercise files from your heartrate monitor you need one of the tools listed above.

The application was tested on GNU/Linux (Debian Sarge and Ubuntu 5.10 / 6.06), although it should work on all Unix-like systems. It also runs on Windows 2000/XP, other Win32 systems might work too.

Installation on Linux or other Unix-based systems

You need to perform the following steps:

make sure that your system fulfills all requirements
extract the application archive
change to application directory
call 'make' to compile
call 'make install' to install (you need to be root)

After installation you will find a SportsTracker starter for easy startup in your system menu. If the starter doesn't work you need to make sure that the MONO_DIR in the Makefile is correct for your system (it needs to contain the Mono installation directory). For manual Mono installations it's often "/opt/mono".

If your Mono and Gtk# was not installed to /usr you can get the compile error message "No package 'gtk-sharp' found". Then you need to enter: 'export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/opt/mono/lib/pkgconfig/' (assuming '/opt/mono' is your Mono installation directory) and run 'make' again.

To start the application manually you need to use this command:

mono /usr/local/bin/SportsTracker.exe

If your system can run .NET 'exe' files directly (using BINFMT_MISC in your kernel) then you only need to start 'SportsTracker.exe'.

If you want to uninstall SportsTracker you only need to call 'make uninstall' (you need to be root) in the application directory.

Installation on Win32 systems

See the documentation Install-Win32.txt in subdirectory misc/win32.

Usage

This is a short introduction for the usage of the application:

Before you can add exercises you need to create a list of your sport types in the editor dialog. Examples for sport types are "cycling", "running" or "swimming". For sport types which are not endurance related (e.g. "tennis") you need to specify that distance will not be recorded for such exercises. The distance record mode can only be changed for new sport types or when no exercises for this sport type exist.
By assigning a custom color for each sport type the list of exercises looks much more clear.
For each sport type you need to create at least one subtype. Subtype examples for cycling are "MTB tour", "MTB race", "Road tour" and so on. If subtypes do not make sense for your sport type just create a subtype called "default".

After that it's possible to add and edit exercises. In the exercise dialog you need to specify the date, the sport type, the subtype and the intensity. You also need to enter the distance, the average speed and the duration. In most cases the user has just 2 of these 3 informations. The third one needs to be calculated correctly by pressing the appropriate button. When you choose a sport type for which the distance will not be recorded then you only need to enter the duration of the exercise. All the other inputs are optional. Data such as the route description can be added to the comment text.
Users of heartrate monitors can assign the recorded file to the exercise. Most of the exercise data can be imported from this file, so it does not need to be entered manually. The exercise files can also be viewed with the integrated PolarViewer application, which displays all the recorded data and diagrams for it (except power data).

The calendar view displays all exercises of the selected month. The last column contains the distance and duration summary for all exercises of the appropriate week.

For the creation of statistics the user needs to specify at least the calculation filter for the time range, e.g. the current month. It's also possible to set filters for the sport type, the subtype, the intensity and the comment, so only the specified exercises will be included in the statistic calculation.

The user can also create overview diagrams for all months of a selected year or for a selectable time range of 10 years. The diagram will display the summary distance, duration, ascent and average speed for the sum of all sport types or splitted for each sport type.

Contact

The website of SportsTracker can be found at: http://www.saring.de/sportstracker

You are welcome to use the forum and the bug system on the Sourceforge project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sportstracker) when you have comments, suggestions or problems with bugs. The most recent version of this tool can also be found there. If you're interested in the current development version you can get it from CVS.

If you want to provide a translation for your language take a look at I18N.txt and send me your translation for the CVS-version by mail.

For direct email contact you can use the address: projects@saring.de

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This product includes software developed as part of the NPlot charting library project available from: http://www.nplot.com/

Stefan Saring
2006/08/26