Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- My scale xyz is not supported why?
- Why is my scale not found?
- Why are the measurements are not synchronise to a cloud (e.g. Google fit / Garmin Connect / Dropbox and so on)?
- What are the differences between the openScale pro/light and the f-droid version?
- Why is my language xyz is missing or incomplete?
- How do I get on my SBF70 scale the body metrics (water, muscle, fat percentage)?
- Which scale can you recommend?
- Why do openScale needs permission to the coarse location?
- How to get the openScale debug log file?
I don't own every scale. But openScale is open source and lives from the open source community if you want to help you could try to reverse engineer your scale by analysing the Bluetooth 4.x protocol between your scale and the original vendor app, see Bluetooth 4.x Reverse Engineer tutorial for further information. If you understand the protocol then it is not complicated to implement it into openScale.
If you scale name is not shown up in openScale during the search at Settings->Bluetooth->Your Bluetooth scale then you must first unpair the scale with your smartphone in the Android bluetooth settings or within an installed vendor app. Please also make sure that your scale is turned on and you granted the coarse location permission during the search. Finally check that the batteries of your scale are full enough.
Why are the measurements are not synchronise to a cloud (e.g. Google fit / Garmin Connect / Dropbox and so on)?
Personally I don't want to synchronise any health data to a company for privacy reasons. Therefore, openScale doesn't send any data to a cloud and not having permission to access the internet is a strong guarantee of that. Additionally, most of the used licenses by the cloud companies are incompatible with the GPLv3 license. So openScale won't support it directly but every user are free to do it anyway, just (auto) export your data and do whatever you like, see for example the Autosync with Nextcloud tutorial.
If you want to synchronise your weight to GoogleFit and/or MQTT 3.1, you can install openScale sync from GooglePlay.
The openScale pro supports Bluetooth scales and the light version doesn't. But if you don't want to pay for the pro version, you could test or use the f-droid version, because the pro and f-droid version are identical.
I don't speak every language. If your language is missing or incomplete please translate the strings.xml into your language and then create a pull request on GitHub or use Weblate to translate the app. The current translation status for openScale is as follow:
Probably you have user names assigned by the vendors app "health coach" that are not the same as in openScale. Please make first a backup of your measurements before you continue! To resolve this problem please delete all users in the vendors app (or reset the scale with the button on the back) and then open openScale and add a new user. After you synchronise to the SBF70 scale with openScale you should receive all other body metrics.
As I don't own all scales by myself I can't really say which works the best with openScale but in issue #96 I wrote some thoughts which you may consider in your decision.
The answer is simple because the Android API >= 6.0 needs access to the coarse location to search for Bluetooth devices. The App openScale doesn't read your location at any time. Read the official Android Bluetooth Developer Guide or read the Android 6.0 Changelog for a more technical description.
Go to Settings->Info and enable the "Save debug log to file" option, select a path and filename where the log file should be saved. Reproduce your error in openScale for example connect via Bluetooth to your scale to log the Bluetooth communication. If you are finished go to Settings->Info and disable the "Save debug log to file" option to write the debug log file on your smartphone. Paste it with the markdown code tag in a new issue or attach the log file in an issue.