Fitbit nodes - working?

General
1

Continuing the discussion from Fitbit - anyone have it working with node red?:

There are a couple of nodes available for Fitbit.

Has anyone got either of them working recently?

Neither node seems to have had any love recently judging by the release dates.

2

In answer to my own question, I have found the following -

The 'official node' (node-red-node-fitbit (node) - Node-RED) does not seem to want to authenticate. it looks like it is old (last release says nearly 12 years) and FitBit have updated their authentication methods. Maintainer is listed as @dceejay but that may be as it is also part of a wider set of flows.

There is a contrib node (node-red-contrib-fitbit (node) - Node-RED) but again has not had any updates recently. It may work, but I could not get the right callback URL.

However, there is a fork of the contrib node (GitHub - inglevir/node-red-contrib-fitbit) which does work and has had some recent updates to it.

You do need to set your Node-RED instance up using https, but other than that the authentication worked first time and it usefully provides the correct callback URL.

Is there any appetite to get a 'core' node working well and develop the data recovered from the API? My JS is not up to it, but happy to test :slight_smile: .

I'd also like to write data to FitBit as well.

The forked node does what I need right now (which was to get the Battery Level) so I can trigger some reminders to charge/take off charge which was my primary driver at the start of this.

[edit]
After more investigations, it is clear these nodes are designed to work with an old API that only probably still works as it is a legacy format. Take a list of activities (API Docs Get Activity Log List) the API docs suggest the URL should be of a format such as;

https://api.fitbit.com/1/user/-/activities/list.json?afterDate=2019-01-01&sort=asc&offset=0&limit=2

The forked node is generating a URL like (ignore the distance parameter)

https://api.fitbit.com/1/user/-/activities/distance/date/2021-12-22/7d.json

I suspect changing the format might be relatively easy if I understood enough JS. I think probably the nodes need an extensive update to match the API.

3

Indeed - the "core" node was contributed to the project by a small team at IBM many years ago. I don't have a fitbit (and have no interest in getting one) so the node is just sitting there as part of that larger collection. I guess we should really delete/remove it... but if you feel like playing with it and trying to update it then we would be very grateful. More than happy for you to take it as a learning exercise. It certainly can't be more broken than it is already :slight_smile:

4

I suspect what I primarily need is someone to help with a template on how to create the right URLs based on the input selections. I can work out most of what is going on but not how the actual URLs are generated (so moving from a /xxx/ to a &xxx= format).

I think moving it out of this combined contrib node might be a good idea and making it standalone. I'd be happy to be guided on how to make a contribution to it. I think the fork I mentioned above would be the best place to start as the authentication does actually work.

5

If anyone is interested I have created an updated node and called it fitbit2 as it is probably not backward compatible.

Works better with the HA Node-RED addon (key task), extended the API EndPoints serviced and improved the help/documentation.

Still needs some more work, but functional for now.

1 Like
6

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.