Garmin Swim Firmware 3.4 Released

Swam this morning with no problems. Lately I was often seeing at least 1 turn missed during a workout, but today (with the latest firmware) the distance was right on.

I should also warn... all settings and data was deleted in the upgrade process.

" Fixed session pace rollover bug for swims longer than 4200m."

That one clears up a mystery for me. All of my swims of more than 4200m would end up with some crazy average pace of 12+ min/100 yds, while all my shorter swims would be accurate. I hadn't figured out that it was distance based. Until one swim last week, I thought it might have something to do with drill mode, but I was able to rule that out. I hadn't really dug into the issue since I have only had the Swim for a little over a month, but I had only been able to find one other person posting on this forum about that issue.

I don't see anything there about stroke recognition. It will be interesting to see if it still thinks I'm doing butterfly when swimming freestyle pretty fast.

how to use countdown start? i enabled it in menu, but couldnt find where to set up

Thanks to NORD0296 for posting about the update. You beat me to it! :-)

Countdown start - Enable it in the menu. In Swim Mode, it won't count you in to the first interval (off the start/stop button) but it will count you in every time you start an interval from the paused state. You can give it a try at your desk and you should be able to see it work.

Other highlights:
- Length counting accuracy improvement: Super-fast swimmers (or strong swimmers in small pools) had been seeing some missed lengths and this has been addressed. For swimmers who had been getting extra lengths, they will also see an improvement in length counting accuracy.
- The session distance tracker in the bottom field has been very popular with testers.

The bad news is that the stroke type identification was not addressed specifically in this update. It's next though!

The bad news is that the stroke type identification was not addressed specifically in this update. It's next though!

Presumably Garmin has the sales and marketing data to verify, but I'd guess that a significant number of Swim users are triathletes like myself who never swim any stroke other than freestyle. (Butterfly!!?? I don't see "drowning" anywhere on my training plan.) How about making automatic stroke recognition an option and give users the chance to manually set the stroke?

Stephen

I like the idea of manually setting the stroke type. It wouldn't work for deliberately mixed sets like IM without getting really complicated, but there could be the option to set the stroke type for an upcoming interval, or letting the device detect it as it currently does. Usually about half of my butterfly lengths are identified as freestyle and about half of my freestyle lengths are identified as butterfly when swimming fast. When swimming easy to moderate, it doesn't seem to have any trouble recognizing freestyle.

On the topic of the recent update, I swam last night after updating and my device still missed a lap. It was during the butterfly portion of a 200 IM, where it didn't detect the turn so it only recorded 25 yards of fly when I actually did 50. This was only my 12th time using the Swim and I only had one previous workout with a missed length and one workout with an extra length. I have used a 910xt for nearly a year and would only get a missed length or extra length recorded about once every five or six workouts. I'm basically at 1 error in 4 workouts for the Swim and 1 for 1 after the new update. We'll see how it does with continued use...

Countdown start - Enable it in the menu. In Swim Mode, it won't count you in to the first interval (off the start/stop button) but it will count you in every time you start an interval from the paused state. You can give it a try at your desk and you should be able to see it work.

My idea about the countdown start would be a delayed start of 1 second in all situations. Would be nice to measure the accurate time between pushing the button and start for most swimmers first. Might be 0,5 seconds.
Erik

A lot of tri people don't seem to like swimming anything other than freestyle, but I like to coach them to try other strokes to build strength in all muscles and to break up the monotomy of the sets

First try with 3.4 this morning and it all seems to be fine - hopefully they can get the stroke ID sorted with the next realease

Overall the 3.4 update has been an improvement for me. Lap counting is more accurate, glad the over 4200m bug has been fixed. However...
-25 y sprints under 15 sec don't always register. Sometimes they show up as "rest" when viewing the data in Garmin connect.
-When doing sprints the wrong stroke gets recorded. (ie free for fly, or fly for free)
-When the "count down" is enabled it does not work on the first interval, (when first starting the session.) The clock just starts without the 3,2,1.
-Admittedly my backstroke isn't the best, but it often shows up as breaststroke or freestyle.