Accessing ANT+ w/Tasker

[Scotty Hall]

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and it has the ANT+ service installed.  I am also a cyclist and I use a cycling GPS to track my rides, speed, cadence and heart rate.  The cycling GPS uses sensors on the bike that transmit to the head unit in ANT+.  Is Tasker capable of tapping into that ANT+ service on my phone and capturing the data coming from the sensors on my bike?  If so, can anyone point me in the direction to get started in doing so?

[Marta Hintz]

I am interested in this as well.

[Scotty Hall]

Just thought I would bump this just in case there might be someone with some insight.

[Milan Roubal]

There are not so many applications for ANT+ existing so far. For showing values on the Note 3 I am using this application: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dsi.ant.antplus.pluginsampler
but I would say the frequency of the values is too high to be processed by Tasker. I think you would need to find good balance between how many events are fired. So far I have not heard about any direct plugin to Tasker.

[Scotty Hall]

Thanks for your reply Milan.

As far as ANT+ applications for the phone, you are correct in that there doesn't seem to be that many, but fortunately for me there are some for cycling.  So I dont think its a frequency issue as I used to run an application that captured the signal from the sensors on my bike and turned them into speed, location, heart rate, cadence, etc. to display on my phone.  Just guessing, but I would imagine all I need to do is have Tasker access the ANT+ service that is already on the phone as thats all the cycling apps do is just access the service that receives the signals from the sensors.

At any rate, I suspect I am venturing beyond what most people would typically do with Tasker as most of what I see relates to phone specific automation, which is fine, I dont mind doing the exploring and experimenting, I just really dont know where to start with regards getting the data to Tasker.

[Milan Roubal]

Don't get me wrong. I was testing hard the step sensor added to Tasker during the last beta and as you can imagine you do around 1 or 2 steps per second. But if there was task assigned to each step, the overhead of Tasker was so high, that it was processing my steps home for 2 minutes and I need to have changed the processing to every 10 steps. How many events the ANT+ sensores would produce? 10 per second?

So I would say Tasker is not good application for this measurement. Where I can imagine the usage of Tasker is like detection of ANT+ device in surrounding and starting the bicycle application based on that event.

[Scotty Hall]

I think I understand what you are saying now.  No, I dont want to tap into it for constant measurement, just snapshots.

I posted a picture as I was able to see the sensors on the phone.  So my assumption is that I could use Tasker to just take a snapshot of the data for the purpose of sending in something like an SMS, not for constant data measurement.  I have a dedicated cycling computer for that.

[Scotty Hall]

Doing some more digging,  I see the services/packages related to the ANT+ service on the phone. The question now is Tasker able to access those and extract any specific data from that? Or am I at the stage writing something custom is needed?