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Nike+ Ipod : what do you do when you forget it ?

It’s great to take your personal trainer and motivator along, but it’s less great if something happens.

What do you do when you forget to take along your nike+ iPod on your run, or heaven forbid, what happened to me, your latest and greatest run of almost 5 kilometers doesn’t get saved because you mucked around with your music after finishing your run ?

You yell. You shout damnation. And then you google around and hack the darn thing of course !

DISCLAIMER. You muck around with YOUR iPod at YOUR OWN RISK. Nothing is guaranteed to work, this is a hack so I could get my run up there. I am not doing this cheat, I want to keep a log of my runs.

With googling, I found my first reference to hacking the iPod sport kit – it’s simple really. You first need to configure your iPod in diskmode, otherwise you won’t be able to access it. Then you can find the files you need. They are in xml, so you can open them in textmate or smultron or textedit. Go to the following directory (I used midnight commander, a port installed unix utility, you could use XFolders) :

/Volumes/<name of your ipod nano>/iPod_Control/Device/Trainer/Workouts/Empeds/<hexfilename of your linkmodule>

You’ll find, beside a bunch of other files that you don’t need to touch, two directories : ‘latest‘ and ‘synched‘. Any files that are in the ‘latest’ directory are not yet synced with the nikeplus website.

So what I did was to browse the xml files in the’synched’ directory, find one where the distance and time where close to what I needed, and copied that file to my desktop.

I then edited it in textmate, and changed the time and distance to reflect my most recent run, to the best of my recollection. I roughly calculated the duration by multiplying the minutes and seconds in the duration string by 60 000. My guess is that the durationString and distanceString are the voice items that your iPod speaks to you, with the more correct variables in the duration and distance properties.

<time>2007-05-29T20:10:38+02:00</time>
<duration>1947280</duration>
<durationString>32:12</durationString>
<distance unit="km">4.8906</distance>
<distanceString>4.89 km</distanceString>

I also modified the start time lower down and deleted everything between the snapShotList property (this is when you press the center button to hear your status, it saves this as well) :

<startTime>2007-05-29T20:10:38+02:00</startTime>
<snapShotList snapShotType="userClick"></snapShotList>

I also renamed the file correctly to the current date and start time to run, and then copied the modified file back to ‘latest‘ directory. Then I ‘trashed’ the iPod to remove it, restarted iTunes and waited with my fingers crossed to see if the sync would happen. It did, and it uploaded it just fine to nikeplus !

My guess is that somebody with a bit more time and more inclination could easily whip up a website or program that would allow you to fill in a form and construct for you the correct xml file to import… It would be really handy for when you forget your iPod or lose oh so precious run data from your last run.

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One reply on “Nike+ Ipod : what do you do when you forget it ?”

Alex, in response to your “somebody with a bit more time and more inclination could easily whip up a website or program that would allow you to fill in a form and construct for you the correct xml file to import”…

I’ve developed RUNNER+ http://www.runnerplus.com/ where you can sync your data and do quite a bit more with it. You can also edit your data. Soon I’ll be adding the ability to add a new run (without the pace data of course). Once that’s done you will be able to download your data in the Nike+ XML format. Currently you can download your run and snapshot data in CSV format. Check it out!

Chris
http://www.runnerplus.com/runs/chris

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