Acknowledged
10 days ago
CIQQA-3459

bug: no way to set elevation unit on vivoactive 5

This probably should also be reported in the vivoactive 5 forum, but since that's not monitored by Garmin employees, I'll try here.

A user of one of my apps reported that they can't change the elevation unit from feet to meters. I told them to do it in the system settings (my app uses DeviceSettings.elevationUnits). But it turns out that Garmin left that possibility out from vivoactive 5.

The only settings (both on-watch and via Garmin Connect) are:
distance, weight, height, temperature, pressure.

Note, it's not a mistake, it's height, with cm or inches, and not elevation or altitude that's supposed to be meters or feet.

This is vivoactive 5 with FW version 14.15

Yes, there's no barometer in va5, but it doesn't matter, because the watch displays the correct elevation based on GPS, just in feet.

See also: https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivoactive-5-series/418980/bug-no-way-to-set-elevation-unit-on-vivoactive-5

flocsy🤠
Parents
  • 3 days ago

    >  Yes, there's no barometer in va5, but it doesn't matter, because the watch displays the correct elevation based on GPS, just in feet.

    Circling back to this.

    So the entire bug report is based on the fact that you thought GPS elevation is actually accurate in general, because you thought it happened to be correct in one case, except that the value returned by ActivityInfo.altitude was in feet (although it's documented as metres). This is despite the fact that it's well known that the ActivityInfo fields don't change their units for any reason (except for ActivityInfo.*cadence, which switches between steps per minute and rpm based on whether the activity is running or cycling :/, leading to various "half cadence" bugs over the years)

    So you thought that for 10+ years, Garmin had been hiding elevation data on baro-less watches and applying elevation corrections in Connect for no reason, and that you're the first person to discover this?

    But now that you realized on your own that GPS elevation is not accurate (even though Garmin and everyone else has been trying to tell you that), it's all good I guess.

Comment
  • 3 days ago

    >  Yes, there's no barometer in va5, but it doesn't matter, because the watch displays the correct elevation based on GPS, just in feet.

    Circling back to this.

    So the entire bug report is based on the fact that you thought GPS elevation is actually accurate in general, because you thought it happened to be correct in one case, except that the value returned by ActivityInfo.altitude was in feet (although it's documented as metres). This is despite the fact that it's well known that the ActivityInfo fields don't change their units for any reason (except for ActivityInfo.*cadence, which switches between steps per minute and rpm based on whether the activity is running or cycling :/, leading to various "half cadence" bugs over the years)

    So you thought that for 10+ years, Garmin had been hiding elevation data on baro-less watches and applying elevation corrections in Connect for no reason, and that you're the first person to discover this?

    But now that you realized on your own that GPS elevation is not accurate (even though Garmin and everyone else has been trying to tell you that), it's all good I guess.

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