Feature request: fully offline route uploading to Karoo
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This was requested several times from the beginning. It will never happen. I strongly advise to change to a different manufacturer which offer this functionality. I got in a dangerous situation abroad and couldn't upload a new route to safety. If you are bikepacking, adventure biking stay away from HH.
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There is this new feature that allows pushing a GPX from your mobile using the Companion app via Bluetooth directly to the Karoo (supposedly the K2 as well). Isn't that offline enough? It doesn't work on my device (my mobile) but it's likely a bug as it has been reported working by others.
When I bought my K2 last November, I dug into it and it seemed that they need(ed) the internet connection to add a route because they are doing the GPX conversion on their backend and then syncing the converted data down to the device. (They use CouchDb to easily sync data between the backend and the device and also store the routes there.) So, at least back then, they probably only had the conversion code for the backend.
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This works on my K2, I can upload a route from my phone without connecting the K2 to wifi. But the route still needs to be processed by Hammerhead cloud before uploading to K2. Therefore this just simplifies the process, but you still need to have at least cellular network to upload the gpx file to Karoo. I am requesting to have this processing offline as well because I can plan a route offline on my phone but I cannot upload it to Karoo without the cloud processing.
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Their system being designed that way simply means that they don't have the GPX parser code on the K2. When I bought my device last November and found out about how laborious it is to put a freaking route on this *navigation device* then I looked into how it works. Internally it uses a different format from GPX (well, I guess all software does) and stores the routes in a db (namely couchdb, a bit unusual choice but one can understand the reasons).
Now goven how that db works it would be perfectly possible to load the routes on the device and even get them to synch automatically to the server (BTW, that's how your rides get there). They just don't want to add it to the K2. Also, the GPX conversion could happen on the phone (which is a faster, more powerful device) and they could just push over the preprocessed data in a very similar forat to how they store it. Heck, if they published the interface and the format for loading it into the db, I bet quite a few of us would do it as an open-source project. After all, this is an android device...
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@atlea this worked just for a brief moment right after the K3 was released and never since
my whole issue with the uploading the track is that I have to be online and it happens quite often that I am in the middle of the woods and I need to reroute. I can create a new gpx easily with something like mapy.com but I cannot upload it to the K2 which is kind of sad. Even if it would be some kind of limited featureset where it would be breadcrumbs only or whatever it would greatly improve the current situation where I am in the middle of nowhere and have to take out my phone out of my pocket every 5 minutes.
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I think people have reported using OSMAnd on K2. Though I'm not sure how you would get the GPX on the device even then (unless you can implement doing that using Bluetooth), but that would mean you could plan a route using the device and then navigate with the installed external map app.
But I guess that would drain the battery considerably faster than the built-in mapping app.
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I managed to sideload mapy.com and I could even download it's offline maps and do the planning and navigation on the K2, but then you have to use that app for the navigation so that you don't see any other data from your sensors, radar etc, I keep that as a backup, but it's quite cumbersome solution. If I want that ride to be saved in my Suunto account and Strava, I have to start the route also the regular way or fiddle with the exporting and I would not have my sensor data as well. I am also not sure what would the battery life would be.
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