Garmin Edge 830

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Overview

GPS for bicycling

Features:

  • Compact with reasonably big color touch screen and a good handlebar mounting system
  • GPS and GLONASS receiver
  • WiFi, Bluetooth
  • ANT+

It has 16GB of storage space, on my new device about 1/2 is available.

Garmin seems intent on directing me to use "Garmin Connect". "Garmin Connect" seems like a muddled mess of fitness / athletic garbage of little interest to me.

At the moment all I want to do is:

  1. design a GPX route, preferably in http://ridewithgps.com/
  2. send the route to the Edge without dancing through several other web sites and apps
  3. do the ride and record it
  4. send the journey back up to RideWithGPS.

I don't want to track my weight, calories burned, fitness level, VO2 max, how much water I drank, yadayadayada. My fitbit does fitness things and that's all automatic. I don't want to "compete" with other Connect users.

Transferring files

Works like most other Garmin GPS receivers, plug in USB cable to PC and it appears as a storage device. Use the right cable I keep finding out some of my cables are charge-only, when I do, I throw them away. The one that came in the box works!

Software

Current firmware: 3.50 as of 2019-07-04

Use Garmin Express when you are on a PC and have a real USB cable connected. It lets you

  • Add and remove "ConnectIQ" apps (yes, there are apps!)
  • Adjust settings
  • Update installed maps (ones from Garmin anyway)

Looks like I could remove apps I don't care about including the Strava and Trailforks things.

ConnectIQ Apps

Installed:

  • Notifications, Controls, Weather, Segment Explorer are all marked as Built-in Widget.
  • Best Bike Split "Development Application" 127K useless for me
  • Trailforks "Development Application" 71K probably useless
  • Strava Routes "Development Application" 56K useless

I clicked on "Get More Apps" in Garmin Express and it took me here: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/devices/edge830/apps

Apparently you can install simple apps that change the way data is displayed, and more complex ones that, well, do stuff. Go look at https://developer.garmin.com/ for more general Garmin Developer info and especially https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/programmers-guide/ for ConnectIQ info.

Hacking around

If I could read it, I bet the Garmin/GarminDevice.xml would spell out much of the following.

Map files appear to be rattling around in the Garmin/ folder.

The spatial format of the day appears to be "fit" files, new to me. They appear in:

  • Garmin/Activities/ with date stamps
  • Garmin/Courses/
  • Garmin/Locations/Locations.fit is pois/waypoints including the one I created and stupid ones that Garmin put in there. (For Garmin headquarters)
  • Garmin/MapThemes/Mountain.kmtf appears to be an XML style file.
  • Garmin/NewFiles contains temp.gpx, which is a track file I just sent over from BaseCamp, and a fit file which a guid name.
  • Garmin/Records/Records.fit ??
  • Garmin/RemoteSW/CPE.BIN ??
  • Garmin/Schedules/Schedules.fit ??
  • Garmin/Segment_List/segment_list.fit
  • Garmin/Segments/ currently empty
  • Garmin/Settings/Settings.fit
  • Garmin/Sports/ has a ROAD and a TOUR file, so those are probably the settings I created
  • Garmin/Summary/ is empty
  • Garmin/Text/*.gtt language files that I could probably just delete when I need more space. There is no English.gtt so I could delete all of them.
  • Garmin/Totals/Totals.fit
  • Garmin/Weight/Weight.fit
  • Garmin/Workouts

Other interesting folders,

  • Garmin/Debugging/ has Backup/ containing more fit files and EventLogs/ containing TXT files which are readable log files.
  • Garmin/SQL/CustomMaps.db is a SQLite file

There are more uninteresting folders... :-)

Startup message

See Garmin/startup.txt, it contains 

<display = 0>

so I added 4 lines of text and change 0 to 10. It works!

Automatic data uploads

There is a top level file called autorun.inf that looks like this: 

[autorun]
shellexecute=http://connect.garmin.com/transfer/upload
icon=Garmin\Garmintriangletm.icon
action=Upload to Garmin Connect
label=Garmin Edge 830

I am guessing this means it connects to that URL and sends new data when it powers up or connects to a network. I am thinking I could spoof the URL and catch the data.

History

  • 2019-07-04 unpacking day
  • 2019-06-30 purchased from GPS City
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