How to use your Garmin watch to tell your team you’re going for a run

Building an API in NodeJS and R to send message to Slack from your Garmin watch.

Why on earth

ThinkR is a remote company, meaning that we all work from our home. On top of other cool things about remote work, this allows me to skip my lunch break and take a one hour break in the middle of the afternoon for sport. And I usually go for a run around 2 or 3 pm, but that moment in the day is not exactly the same every day. And most of the time, I forget to tell everyone that I’m leaving the office. I recently joked that my 2020 resolution was that I’ll be more strict about telling when I arrive and leave the “office”.

I was sure it can be done straight from my watch. And guess what, it can!

The Slack Part

The slack API is pretty amazing and allows you to use a personal web hook and a curl call to send messages to a selected channel on Slack.

Note: there are several packages in R that can be used to send messages to Slack, for example {slackr}: https://github.com/hrbrmstr/slackr & {slackteams}: https://github.com/yonicd/slackteams. But as I just wanted to make a simple, unique call, it was more straightforward to write it directly.

So:

• Go to https://api.slack.com/

• Click on Start Building

• Add an app name and add it to a workspace

• Add a new “Incoming Webhooks”, and select the Channel to post in

And Tadaa 🎉 you now have a curl call that looks like this:

curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' 
  --data '{"text":"Hello, World!"}' 
  https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/WEBHOOK/URL/HERE

Now time to turn this into an API.

Node API

Here is a very simple API built in NodeJS:

const express = require('express')
const app = express()

app.get('/', function (req, res) {
  const request = require('request');
  
  const options = {
    url: 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/WEBHOOK/URL/HERE',
    json: true,
    body: {
      text: "I'm off for a run!"
    }
  };
  
  request.post(options);
  
  res.send('OK')
})

app.listen(9999, function () {
  console.log('API listening on port 9999!')
})

R API

And with R:

library(plumber)

#* @get /
function() {
  httr::POST(
    url = 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/WEBHOOK/URL/HERE', 
    body = list(
      text  = "I'm off for a run!"
    ), 
    encode = "json"
  )
  
}

Adding this to the watch

I discovered that Garmin has a widget called “API calls”, that let you enter an API endpoint, and the API call is done from the watch.

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/ac9a81ab-a52d-41b3-8c14-940a9de37544

I just discovered that I can send API calls from my Garmin watch and I'm very excited about this and that also made me realized that I'm definitely a big nerd. pic.twitter.com/2h4fk8tCnf

— Colin Fay 🤘 (@\_ColinFay) January 7, 2020

So here it is, I’ve got a Widget on my watch that I can use to send message on Slack 🎉

You know you're a nerd when you deploy an API that posts to Slack from your Garmin watch so that you can tell your team that you're going for a run instead of just… you know… typing it. pic.twitter.com/f2cwn1pxd7

— Colin Fay 🤘 (@\_ColinFay) January 7, 2020