Your Garmin help, please

I've got longer out of the 800 but not while using navigation. I think it's the combination of using navigation and doing 3-400k+ that kills the older Garmins. So far the 1000 has been much more stable than the 800/810s but the nav is shit and the screen is annoying when wearing gloves. Oh and battery life sucks.

My battery was good. 7h with route navigation and backlight off.

I always make my own gpx routes. Never bothered with garmin nav (as it's crap as you know). But navigating my gpx route, it always was good.

I use it to get to people's houses and stuff. I don't have time to preload routes - that's why it has ad hoc routing ability.

Also annoying that I either can't run the screen on and have it last a long while - I could get 13hrs training with the power visible throughout on the old unit OR I can't turn the stupid backlight off and it's at 45% after 4hrs.

Want to start a kickstarter to build a super cycling computer?

Ha! Wasn't @andyp doing something like that already? I don't have time to make my own routes let alone build a GPS device. Currently emailing back and forth pointless statements with Garmin - I've sent them their error logs and asked if there's a way of getting more debug information and they've asked me to screenshot the error. Fucksake! Taking a picture of the error message I've already sent you is not going to help! Muppets!

I think an android based bike computer is a Kickstarter just waiting to happen.

Pioneer have already released one.

Yeah. Although for me a key thing is integration with Strava. I used to use a Holux GPSport260 which (as a GPS co-ordinate logging device with ANT+) was significantly better than my Garmin 500.

However, the software was pretty clunky and I had to manually import the file to the Holux app, then convert to GPX and upload to Strava myself. So I now stick with a slightly crappy device which is affected by a Go-Pro slung below the bars (this never bothered the Holux) because of laziness.

The cycling product manager left, which I think says it all about the chances of my employers ever releasing a specific cycling computer.

Which is a shame as the product we were working on was good. (As you'd expect with 3 cyclists involved).

A good cycling computer?

An Android-based bike computer?

I've actually found the navigation on the 1000 way better than my old 810, but it did take some tweaking. I'll add my settings to the thread when I get home.

Cheers, I'd appreciate it. Perhaps it just doesn't like me smashing it down A roads and ignoring its constant requests to make u-turns off 'em.

You using the built-in maps?

Yeah, using built-in maps.

So I've got Routing Mode: Road Cycling,
Calculation Method: Minimize Distance,
Lock on Road: On
Recalculation: Prompted
For Avoidance Setup, I've got Major Highways, Toll Roads, Unpaved Roads and Narrow Tracks all activated.

Give something like that a go. On the 810 I used to use automobile mode (or it would try and make me use tiny cycle lanes), but the road cycling mode on the 1000 hasn't done the same to me yet. I don't use nav on the unit every single day, but when I have done so it's suggested a good route and not sent me down stupid roads.

This guy has also written a guide about navigation with the 1000, and his settings seem to be similar to mine: http://www.forgot.co.uk/garmin-edge-navigation/garmin-edge-1000/

That sounds like what I've got already (though I ended up switching a lot of options on/off to try and improve the situation) and it was insisting on a 200k back lane route home when bashing down the A44 and A40 = <110k So, I'm not sure how "Minimize Distance" is applied.

I'll check it again tonight though. Cheers!

Looking at those settings I'd guess that Avoid Major Highways would probably deter it from the A44 and A40.

I tried it with "Avoid Highways" and "Avoid Interstates" on and off and it was either bad or worse. :)

This is why I navigate by following a coloured line on the map page. Sure I've missed junctions and added distance on, but I don't have to deal with route (re)calculations, and I'm pretty good at remembering the route anyway.

If I want turn-by-turn instructions it's a little bit more of a faff, but the Edge 705 was able to navigate against a similar track (made with GPXX extensions) so that it had no choice in the routing as each of the trackpoints it had to go through were only ~80 yards from the previous one.

I've got no idea whether the newer devices can be fed a track and be told "I want to go exactly this way, give me turn by turn directions."

I rarely ever need directions for a route I don't know in advance. And if I did I'd be quite happy to see what the Garmin suggests and then ride based on a zoomed out map to cut off any unnecessary stupidity it suggests.

I can't find the link to where it was explained but basically the roads on a map have different weighting according to how cycle friendly they are (i.e. major A roads score badly, cycle lanes score well) and the more cycle friendly a road you request, the more emphasis will be given to this weighting.

If you choose to minimise distance/time then more weighting is given to these factors. Choose Automobile routing and then car weighting will come into play.

Different maps, e.g. OSM, talkytoaster, Garmin Official, may have different ranking for different roads.

Here's a rather extreme version for Google on walking mode:-

https://goo.gl/maps/xLCswgb9H5H2

It wants to avoid the short stretch of road by Teddington Locks, so it sends you on a 3 mile detour.

OSM's routing layer used to be missing loads of the interconnections, so it wouldn't send you down the obvious route because it though the main road was a cul-de-sac and wasn't connected to the next bit of road. It's got a lot better recently though.

I just wish they'd properly categorise the different options and publish the criteria.

This would prevent all the trial and error that we've all had to go through to end up with settings we're happy with. For example, Hippy would be able to specifically check what road type the A40 and A44 are classified as and adjust his settings accordingly.

Does something like that exist?

I think it will do for OSM, probably not the Garmin maps. This is the OSM info on road classifications https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing

The only reason I was using the navigation (since I knew how to get home via the A44 and A40) was to test its navigation ability. I need to run this piece of crap through the ringer quickly because I don't want another case of the 810, where I had to argue to get my money back because I'd had the unit for 6 months.

The other thing was - it would be nice if it could offer a laney route that didn't almost double the distance home. It can't be that hard to find B roads that head in the same direction without adding massive overdistance.

Following a predefined track seems to work ok on most units (until they crash and die obviously). This was an ad hoc route using the 1000's built-in OSM/Cycling maps.