Rebuilding my windows machine and I needed to get Mapsource back on to it so I could work on cleaning up gpx routes. But I couldn’t find the CD anywhere. And trying to download it from Garmin’s site (here) was pointless as it wouldn’t install unless you had a previous version to upgrade.

While mucking around this morning trying other Garmin apps I found out that if you install Training Centre (download here) then it’s enough to make the Mapsource installer think it’s already installed and let you install the ‘update’.

Now I’ve got the OpenStreetMap maps back on as well I can get on with sorting a route out for the Tramway 100 from Crich on Saturday. Looks like a fun hilly 100km audax round the peak district, though with a profile like this:

I do wonder how my legs are going to feel when I head out on Saturday night for a birthday do.

Garmin’s basecamp software isn’t as nice as some of the online course creation software (bikeroutetoaster, bikehike, etc). And if you use one of those and export a GPX file or download one from bikley or mapmyride then it usually won’t go straight onto your Edge and give you a proper routing route.

Having managed to get a proper working route onto my Edge using Basecamp and Waypoints I wanted to crack doing this. Especially as Basecamp on a Mac is even more annoying and frustrating than on a windows box.

From what I can see there’ll never be a perfect straight conversion from GPX to a route as there’s too much inconcistency between what’s being produced. A GPX trail (either from a ride or downloaded) can have any of the following faults which will guarentee crap route conversion, here’s a couple with pictures of what they look like:

Misplaced course point on a bridge over main road on track imported to Garmin Edge 800

This quite a common on. The track went over a bridge crossing a main dual carrigeway. The GPX trackpoints weren’t perfectly aligned with the map and were on the A1 rather than the bridge crossing it. So the routing algorithim had to come up with the route above (the brown bit) to pass through all the points. Removing the trackpoints over the bridge and recalculating the route fixed this one.

Roundabout problem with tracks on Garmin Edge 800

Roundabouts appear to be another common problem with the tracks I’ve played with. In this example the points on the ‘ring’ are slightly off and are actually on the feeder roads, so to pass through them the router has to take you along each off road until it can find somewhere to turn around, bring you back to the roundabout, do another loop and repeat. Again, this is easily fixed by removing all the trackpoints on the roundabout and relying on the software to route you round the roundabout.

Garmin Edge 800 routing problems with tracks when road doesn't exist

This one is particularly annoying. This is caused by the map not having the required roads on it. In this case this is  Open StreetMap, so I could fix this problem by switching to the Garmin City maps which did have the required roads. (And since this is part of the ‘Everyone rides to skeggy 300 which I’m riding on Saturday these roads should exist in OSM in the next 10 days :) ). This isn’t alway a guarenteed fix though, on one ride mapped on a Google based site the roads were fine, but didn’t exist on either the Garmin or OSM maps, luckily the route was pretty much ‘follow road’, so I just put up with an ugly looking route, lots of beeping about being off route and setting a waypoint with a note as I was about to head ‘off road’

So far I’ve come up with the following workflow for doing the conversions:

• Import the GPX track
• If it’s really long split it into sections and work on them individually (For an audax splitting at controls makes sense)
• Have a quick scan for obvious problems (like example 1) and try to remove those first (makes the recalculation faster for later steps)
• Remove as many unneeded trackpoints as I can. If a route is going straight along a main road there’s no need for all the intermediate points. And there’s no real need for them across roundabouts as long as there’s one before and one after. Quickest way to do this is to use shift and the cursor arrows to highlight them in the “Course Info” box and then use Remove.
• Then actually follow the directions on the map. This will let you pick up the minor errors I’ve had like:
  • Routing me down trails when I want a road based route (more common on OSM based routes)
  • When a trackpoint is just off and up a side road so the route goes “turn right, head north 10m, head south 10m, turn right”

So it can be quite a bit of work to do. Though being ruthless about cutting trackpoints at step 3 can really make life easier.

woohoo, finally rode a 95% successful route following the Edge 800′s navigation using Open Street Maps last night.

why 95%? Firstly OSM is using some little cycle tracks that I normally wouldn’t and it’s not always clear so on 2 occasions I blithely cycled past thinking it wanted a proper road slightly further on, cue back tracking. The other error was a road that’s no longer there (Knoulton lane no longer offers access to the A46 or Station Road from Kinoulton as it’s been removed between where it used to meet the A46 and A606), so I’ve editted it as removed/not-permitted on OSM so we’ll have to see how quickly it updates the maps.

Getting the OSM maps onto the device was the easiest part of the operation. I downloaded the pre prepared map files from Talky Toaster, unzipped them and placed the .IMG file in the Garmin folder on the SD card in my 800 alongside the City maps. Then restarted my Edge 800 and they showed up ready to be enabled in the System settings menu.

Now to plotting the route in Mapsource. I followed the instructions on TalkyToaster to get the OSM maps into MapSource, which was pretty simple. I laid the route out loosely with about 10 waypoints and then went in to manually reroute the route around some of OSM’s ‘oddities’ then sent it to the Edge.

The main changes I made to the Edge last night before heading out was to disable autorouting and also to ensure that only the OSM map was enabled in the system menu.

All of that seemed to work brilliantly. The Edge wasn’t constantly trying to reroute me and consistently prompted me 200m before any of the turns. Which is a huge improvement over the last couple of attempts.

The next tricks will be to work with longer Audax type routes, routes from gpx imports and also get to grips with Open Street Maps idiosyncratic cycle routing ideas

I eventually gave in and decided that more technology was a good thing and treated myself to the Garmin Edge 800 GPS bike computer. I went for the “Performance/Navigation” bundle, so got the cadence sensor, HR sensor and a better set of maps as well.

Fitting everything was nice and simple. The ‘elastic band’ attchment took about 30 seconds to mount on my stem and seems to have survided a couple of bump rides without rattling or slipping. Fitting the cadence/speed sensor stook a little longer as everything needs to be lined up correctly and within the right tolerances. I think it’s also going to be something that needs checking every so often as I can see the sensor ‘drifting’ slightly around the chainstay and a magnet moving out of range.

There’s plenty of info available and I’ve set up 3 screens for the most common ones. 1 has the sort of thing I’d like all the time : Speed, distance, ride time, real time. A 2nd one for Audax which has:  distance to go, average ride speed, distance to next turn. And finally a 3rd one of ‘nice to knows’ which has battery level, heading, cadence and HR on it. By keeping the number of things on the screen to a minimum everything is nice and readable even without the backlight on (not tried it on an overnight yet). Switching between the screens is pretty easy, even with my full finger gloves on.

Navigation is so far less impressive, though I think I’m understanding why now.  If you were thinking of just being able to plot a route on bikehike, bikeroutetoaster, etc or just tell the device to go from A to B like I did are likely to be disappointed. This isn’t directly a problem with the unit, but a problem with the way that it computes courses

Routing from A to B it appears that the device wants to avoid Main Roads at all costs, even if a quick 800m blast along an A road saves 5 miles of country lane pootling it’ll pick the country lanes.

Even the better quality City navigator maps that came bundled with the device don’t contain all the little roads than tend to make up training circuits or audaxes, so a gpx trace that does use them can’t be ‘routed’ properly as it doesn’t know about the roads. I’ve started playing with Open Street Maps on the Edge, but that’s not without it’s own problems that I’ll cover later.

And then there’s the quality of the routes that come from GPX files and web sites. Quite oftent the track points are very slightly off at junctions and roundabouts. As the software wants to route through all of the points in order, this can quite often end up in multiple loops of roundabouts or a long detour just to pass through a point that’s not on the main road but hovering in housing estate cul-de-sac 10 metres away. The only way round this it to do a sanity check on the route in MapSource before transferring it to the device.

You can just folow the plot of a gpx on the device (which is what I ended up doing on Roses to Wrags) which is reasonably good, but does mean keeping an eye on the map screen all the time which eats the batteries up quicker. Battery life seems to be OK, though it decreases when using the HRM and cadence sensors, and if you have the map screen on constantly. Though I’ve managed 10 hours  without a problem. I’ve got a cheap AA USB charger device from ebay, so hopefully that’ll provide some backup on the longer rides.