nw2s

The Nike SportBand came out. Really, it’s no more than a glorified pedometer, but it stores a lot more data about your running. Now it’s finally no bigger than you would expect. Previously you had to carry around an Ipod Nano.

With both versions, the only real way to get to the data is to upload it to the Nike website. With the Ipod, you could pull the files directly off. I don’t really like the idea of Nike’s website being the only way to really use the data, and would have come up with a way to use the Ipod data if I had one.

I was hoping that the SportBand worked similarly, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. It is a USB device, but the computer sees it as a USB Human Interface Device (a keyboard or mouse, really) instead of a flash drive.

I’ve done a little research into accessing HIDs with the .NET framework, and though it appears possible – with thanks to Jan Axelson, I haven’t yet figured out how to actually read the data off the device. If anyone knows more about this, I’d love to hear about it. Once I have the data, it should be easy enough to build a nice WPF app to display your run data.

Anyway, as a start, the initial critical data for the Nike+ USB device is:

Vendor ID: 11AC
Product ID: 4269

When I use the HID tester though I get the following message:

Device Detected: 
- Vendor ID: 11AC
- Product ID: 4269
The attempt to write an Output report has failed.
The attempt to read an Input report has failed.
The attempt to write a Feature report has failed.
The attempt to read a Feature report has failed.

Well, maybe more later if I can figure some more out.