Acknowledged
8 months ago

BUG REPORT: Bluetooth bug in Venu 3 and Vivoactive 5 firmware

I am a developer of the "Kite WOO+GPS" app. It connects to the kitesurfing sensor (called WOO) via Bluetooth. We received reports from Venu 3 and Vivoactive 5 users that their watch doesn't connect to the sensor. I bought both models and traced the issue to this Bluetooth implementation bug in firmware on these watch models (all other watch models work fine at the moment).

Just to reinforce, it works on all watches except Venu 3 and Vivoactive 5 (also FR165 was not tested yet). In simulator it works, but not on the real watches.

The initial Bluetooth scan and pairing goes as usual, no issues until the app calls:

descriptor.requestWrite(DESCRIPTOR_ENABLE_NOTIFICATION);

After that, the Bluetooth call back never executed:

function onDescriptorWrite(desc, status)

not called. I tried a workaround (proceed without the call back), but the following characteristic.requestWrite fails (throws exception), so workaround is not possible.

Please review and let me know. I can test a beta firmware for Venu 3.

MobileDriveway
  • 8 months ago

    We'll look into this, but does raise a good point—we don't have a WOO sensor we can use to attempt to reproduce this. We'll start by checking for basic functionality using sensors available to us, but we may need to help us out with more specifics depending on how our initial investigation goes.

  • 8 months ago in reply to MobileDriveway

    I'm just trying to help.  Does Garmin have a WOO where they can try to reproduce this?

  • 8 months ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Please do not speculate - leave it for Garmin team to review.

  • 8 months ago in reply to MobileDriveway

    I just tried another app I forgot I had that talks to an HRM-PRO, and it too works.

    How much are you trying to send/receive in a since request?  I always limit both to 20 bytes.  The BLE implementation on Garmin is actually pretty minimal, and it could be different devices handle a large amount of data in different ways.  I think it was the Fenix5 that truncated large amounts of data, but it could be on some, it's just ignored so you won't see a callback in the delegate..

    I just wonder why it only seems to happen with a WOO.  If it was  basic Garmin issue, you see it on other things.

  • 8 months ago in reply to jim_m_58

    The report is very clear - it is 100% Garmin firmware bug and it has nothing to do with what happens on WOO sensor. The same code worked (and still does) on all watches, except the recently released Venu 3 and Vivoactive 5.