ANT Forum

The curent api looks to be rather limited with the lack of support for multiple apps concurently. Thinking from a cyceling point of view I as an end user I would think being able to select a different App for displaying the data to data loging to interactive web feedback and having them all working concurently would be a desirable and to some extent expected feature.

For only Ant+ protocol work I don't realy see a technicasl reason why a higher level Ant+ manager app should not be writen to handle the Ant radio services and then provide Apis alowing multiple Apps to work with it. It's a matter of exposing Intents to alow controll of setup and startup, then haveing some broadcast events for the various Ant+ profiles.

Is anyone working on this? Are there any plans for this? Have I missed somthing that makes this unnessasary or impossible?      

This is definitely not unnecessary or impossible, the API is just not at this point yet. There are many cases to consider before this can be implemented.

A channel is not necessarily a simple receiver of ANT+ sensor data (slave channel), it may need to be a master or send/receive ANT-FS data (or any burst implementation).

The manager must allow multiple applications to connect to the same device, and multiple devices of the same type. It also requires raw ANT channels for new profiles or custom implementations.

Some commands can impact the whole radio (ie. event buffering or a reset), and certain configurations (ie. a channel with a quick message period) will have a negative affect on other channels.

The PC implementations currently also have this limitation.      

OK thanks for the feedback.

Yes an Api to the level you describe is a good bit of work but from the way the android programing environment looks to work (it's all very new to me) I don't see any reason for not getting the well defined Ant+ stuff out there as soon as possible. You can update and add features in a fairly clean manner and even totally re-write the ant handling methodology if you want provided you keep the higher level Apis. You will stabilise Ant+ application development quicker onto a multi app compliant solution solving 80% of the problem for 20% of the work.

It seams like a good partitioning anyway so I am going to look to structure my development with a separate App providing Ant+ related Intents and a ContentProvider managing known devices. It will generate broadcast events with structured Ant+ data for my main App to deal with. At least that way if the main Api changes to add multi app support I have a good deal of insulation in the main part of my App.      

I read with interest a hint that this is being worked on, on the SE Developer World site.
I have structured my bike head unit app IpBike into two seperate apps so as to at least allow myself to do multiple apps talking to ant simultaniously. Although I have not started on a second app yet I am planning to do a logger for HR RR data.

If there is any cance of participating in the design work I am interested.

A beta of the app is avalible off my website. Feedback welcome.