Polar CS300 Web Interface
Posted by ijonas in Uncategorized Apr 5th, 2007 | 8 responsesWow. Kirsty gave a Polar CS300 for my birthday. Its a cycle computer / heart rate monitor. It measures the speed and distance that you travel on a bicycle, as well as your heart rate, calories burnt, and a whole host of other things.
Alongside the CS300, Polar provide a personal trainer website, which allows you to setup a training programme after providing it with some vital stats (age, weight, height, fitness, goals, etc.). The whole site is very easy to use and follows the design ethic of CS300, i.e. being very slick.
Polar provides a WebLink SW software utility that transfers the statistics collected during excercise (heartrate, duration, etc) and uploads these to the personal trainer website, so that you can track your planned training against your actual over time. Very slick, once again.
Now… the coolest feature of the whole setup is the manner in which the CS300 talks to the personal trainer website. If Sony were to produce the CS300, it would supply a proprietary USB cable, that is easily lost and costs £50 to replace. Polar have come up with an old school way of achieving the same thing…. sound modulation.
Yip, the CS300 talks to the WebLink SW using your PC microphone. You launch the WebLink utility and hit the listen button. On the Cs300 watch you select Connect and it starts sputtering squelchy sounds.
One minute later and the personal trainer website contains all your latest training details. Slick, slick, slick.
If you’re into cycling and training, I can’ t recommend the CS300 widely enough. Its a joy to use. The only thing missing from it is a Mac OS X version of the WebLink SW software.
8 Responses to “Polar CS300 Web Interface”
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Thanks, always good posts on your blog!
i’m trying to get my cs300 to work, currently, and i’m having loads of trouble. did you use just your basic microphone or what, because mine’s not reading?!
could you HEAR the noises from your watch, too? cuz i’m not really hearing that either.
ack. mine’s probably busted!
Hi,
First of all the CS300, its working correctly when its making lots of “squelchy” sounds, like a computer modem. It’s clearly audible when you initiate a transfer.
The software is a bit buggy, and it usually takes about 2-3 attempts for the software to pickup the transfer squelches from the watch.
As far as placement is concerned, my laptop (Apple MacBook Pro) has microphone on the left hand side, under the left speaker. So I place the watch face-down on top of the left speaker.
Hope it helps,
Ijonas.
omg is the cs300 a piece of #$$$. I want a hrm monitor that easily downloads into excel formats. If you are looking for computer interface this is surely the wrong way to go. It does not work with the polar software, the only place you can use it is via the polar website which is SO lame. Stay away. Thank god I didn’t pay for this piece of #$#.
Ray
Hey Ray,
Thanks for the comment, but I’m not sure I agree with you. The CS300 is a slick product that “works as advertised”. I know a lot of folk with HRMs and none of them work with Excel to distill their performance data.
That doesn’t mean you’re taking the wrong approach. You’re not. I can totally see the sense in using Excel. Its just that few would use Excel and hence it ends up on the bottom of the prioritised list of Polar feature requests. That doesn’t make the CS300 a piece of shit.
It just doesn’t suit your needs. Have you logged the Excel request with Polar ?
I disagree. All polar devices that are able to “comunicate” with a PC (or Mac) should have the possibility to save the uploaded data to a csv or txt file.. hey XML would even be better.
The thing is that MANY people do require this functionality to manipulate and store their performance data in other programs that offer more features than the indeed LAME ppt.com website.
I really don’t understand that POLAR is trying to monopolize the analysis part, by not allowing an export of the HRM data.
An export funtion can be implemented in less then 1 day of work.. Clearly the developers and marketing team of POLAR do not want to spend this day because they decided that porbably people would start using better software available for free on the market.. Recently a new layout with less functionality had been released of the website.. with still no export possibility..
This is the reason i do not buy a CS300 yet.. I like the unit, what it can do..
But i NEED it to export to a file to store together with other workout data..
And NO, i will not buy another (more expensive) polar unit that can do it.. If a unit can talk with my computer, I expect the output as a file on my harddrive as well..
Untill that happens with the CS300, I do not consider buying it.
Again.. many people are complaining about this , search the net… So why doesnt Polar offer this option.. Because they don’t want to, is my opinion…
A sad consumer, that will not become a Polar consumer, because off lack of respect for potential customers that are serious about their collected HRM data.
I think perhaps a little research and half a brain may help the debate on this blog.
In actuality, Polar offers upwards of 5 OTHER products with this feature. The CS400, RS400, CS600, RS800, S625x.
Here is a bright idea.
You want extra features. Lay down the extra cash on a model that has this feature.
I remember I bought a car in high school and due to the lack of cash from my retail night job couldn’t spend the extra money on the LX model. Guess what, I didn’t write HONDA complaining the lower end model didn’t come with a sunroof, power steering and CD PLAYER! I drove the damn thing till I could afford better!
Thanks for the info on the other Polar products. Good to know they’re out there with this feature.
I’m happy as can be with my CS300, as it does all it needs to. Should I need a better model, I can always sell it my current one on ebay.