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Two Bugs in Turn by Turn Navigation detected

thorum2016
over 8 years ago
Today I went to run a course I created myself, around the place where I work, for the second time.

The course is a 11.92 km loop so the end point is also the start point. Also the first ~100 meters of the course are also the last 100 meters.

To see the course follow https://connect.garmin.com/modern/course/13939195.

The first time I have been runnining this course I had no problems but this time after the first 100m I continued for ~50 in the wrong direction of the course. I noticed the mistake and turned around and followed the course in the correct direction. After turning around I noticed many beeps on my FR735XT, and then turn by turn navigation did not work anymore. The path I was running was drawn normally on the map (black where I have been running on green for the course), but turn by turn said next turn in 10.1 km, instead of a few hundred meters ! I continued running for ~2km but the turn by turn navigation did not reset to the correct position. The distance to the next turn got lower but it was definitely a turn close to the end of the course instead of the next one. This is the first bug.

I did not want to continue without turn by turn navigation even when the course was visible on the map, because I need the alerts for the next turn as I usually set the watch to display my heart rate. So I stopped the timer, pressed the up button to get ino the menu and stopped the course. Then I wanted to restart the course and to continue the activity. But it was not possible to get into the navigation menu. It is simply not available in this state!!! This is the second bug. I see no reason why it should not be possible to restart the same course or to switch course when pausing an activity! I had to completely stop the activity by saving it, then restart the course and restart the timer of a new activity. So now I have to activities where it should be just one (-> no statistics for this activity).

I hope the guys from Garmin read this here, because the last 2 times I reported bugs I did this online via the customer support and did not get even an reception acknowledgment.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    I think the algorithms struggle when you have sections in both directions especially with loop courses and then you take the wrong direction than intended. Might be worth cutting out the first bit across the car park and then leave a little gap between the start and end points to be sure you don't mistakenly do the last bit first which seems like might have happened here. You can, after all, join a course at any point in it - including near to the end.

    The lack of navigation in the menus when you have started an activity is annoying. I did query this with Garmin but they said it was by design. Not entirely sure why - maybe to simplify the options for performance reasons or maybe just because they did not think anybody would want to use it.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Might be worth cutting out the first bit across the car park and then leave a little gap between the start and end points to be sure you don't mistakenly do the last bit first which seems like might have happened here. You can, after all, join a course at any point in it - including near to the end.


    I do the same thing as TIMGROSE suggested. I always leave a small gap between the start and end points on loop courses.

    That said, I like how Suuntos allow you to chose direction when you start following a route. Somehow I haven't found a way to do the same on my 735xt other than making a second course with the opposite direction.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Kalamarios, good suggestion re the direction. I have been creating 2 courses, one clockwise and the other anti-clock as well.

    CW
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Point of a course is not just for navigation but for virtual racing. So while you could reverse a pure route with no performance data you could not do that if you wanted an accurate speed/pace profile according to the gradients in one direction or the other.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Good point Tim. I hadn't considered that

    CW
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    I think the algorithms struggle when you have sections in both directions especially with loop courses and then you take the wrong direction than intended. Might be worth cutting out the first bit across the car park and then leave a little gap between the start and end points to be sure you don't mistakenly do the last bit first which seems like might have happened here. You can, after all, join a course at any point in it - including near to the end.

    The lack of navigation in the menus when you have started an activity is annoying. I did query this with Garmin but they said it was by design. Not entirely sure why - maybe to simplify the options for performance reasons or maybe just because they did not think anybody would want to use it.


    Thank you a lot for your suggestion. But I think this should only be a workaround until this will be fixed. As I am software developer myself, I can guess how the algorythm works: it follows the course turn by turn and computes the distance to what it thinks is the next turn, without ever tracking back. This is a very easy approach and could easily be improved by reselecting the current segment on the course when a heading change is detected. This can be done without draining the battery.

    For the second point: I already had the feeling, that the lack of navigation menues during an activity is by design, but then the design is buggy. What when you have two courses a long one and a shorter one, both loops and sharing the first kilometers. You start running and navigation on the long one but then the weather turns after a while and you don't want to come back in the rain. So you reopt for the shorter course, but that's impossible without stopping the activity. As we don't always have sunny days here in Austria, this is a quite likely scenario. And really, what are the costs of having the navigation menues available during an activity? Very minimal.