Alerts issues - rerouting and Varia integration
I recently switched from a Wahoo Roam V2 because of nasty sync behavior with ridewithgps, and bogus 'poor gps' and other gps lock issues. Like everyone else, I love the display and the maps. The fancy climber feature for climbs not on your route, as well as rerouting have not earned my love. The thing that I hate the most about the K2 so far are its audio alerts. Wahoo does a decent job with this, and what they do is not all that sophisticated.
My first rides using the K2 have been in Girona, Spain riding gravel. I live in the US, so naturally I'm hearing a lot of new birds on these rides. It took me quite awhile to realize that that cute bird sound I was hearing sometimes was actually my K2 trying to alert me to something.
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The alert is almost inaudible. The cute sound blends into the bird sound mix perfectly or is completely masked by even moderate traffic noise.
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The same sound is used for all alerts. I use a Varia radar and the vehicle approaching slowly, vehicle approaching loudly, and all clear alerts are the same as off course and surface change.
I am a retired Android developer. These issues are not tricky to resolve.
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Adding a volume setting for alerts is one day's work at most.
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K2 may be using an audio sample for the alert. If so, this is a waste of on device memory. They should be sampling waveform tables. Check out the open source Csound program for how to do this, it's not hard and you can easily change the pitch. Sine, saw, and squarewave sounds each take only 512 integers to store. These are somewhat annoying sounds, but that is exactly what you want. Start with reasonable defaults, and if user demand warrants, add preferences for each alert use-case.
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Because of these issues, I spend way to much time looking at the K2 to be sure I am still on route, and am too often surprised when a vehicle suddenly passes me.
The K2 has the potential to be really great, but I exhort product management to focus on basic stuff and put the really fancy and difficult to implement features like rerouting and gradient display for off-route climbs on the back burner
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I don't know if it's possible to add personalization to the sounds of those units, as I see no one do it (neither Garmin nor Wahoo), but if it is it should be done. All user definitely don't want the same thing. The other day we were riding with someone with an Edge 1030, we paired my Varia with it, and after less than an hour on a busy road we unpaired it as it was unbearable. And I actually find the sound of the Karoo perfect for me, the only alert I have activated is the Varia, and I hear it just enough to know there is a vehicule incoming, but not to much to bother me all the ride and want to mute it.
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