2ni’s Blog

Distance:   53.01km (singletrail: ca. 12km)
Elevation:  1253m
Duration:   3h36
Avg. Speed: 14.7km/h
Details:    gpsies, trainingstagebuch
TCX file:   TCX file (including elevation alerts)

Inspired by Chregu’s Rund um den Alpnachersee.
Very nice tour for spring. Uphill on a small road not very steap, first to Fräckmünd (1416m), then to Renggpass (886m). You’ll need to carry your bike for 10min to Renggpass.
Mostly on south hillside, so good option for spring!
The downhill from Renggpass is great and nice if you want to learn to drive some serpentines!
Unfortunately the trail was closed by lumberjacks, but happily it was Saturday evening and no work ahead anymore. So I decided to drive trough. I had to walk around some stems and steel cables but it was worth it.
Back in Lucerne there was Chilbi at Allmend and Stadtlauf in Lucerne. So some big mess, which is why I had to drive like a drunken man…
But great tour worth do!

I recently developed a little tool, which was able to add ascent alerts to your garmin tcx course file. It was ok to use, but had still some issues and I had to choose some settings every time I wanted to patch one of my training files.

So I upgraded my tool by keeping some gauss filtering and mainly adding the Douglas-Peucker algorithm for more reliable results.

I’m now quite happy and it’s even faster and easier to use. You can try the tool with any tcx garmin course file.

Go to the tcx extender

I finally managed to find out how to plan my cyclingtrips in case I’m offline, using mapsource, Swiss Topo maps V2, WinGDB3 and GPSbabel. In case you are online I recommend gpsies which has also an online converter.
My thanks go to Manfred!

The problem is, that garmin uses proprietary extensions in the xml description to add calculated route points. Most of the available converting programs (GPSbabel as well) ignore these points and only consider the manually set waypoints.

It seems that GPSbabel will support these route points as well in a future version.

For the time beeing you can follow this procedure to also keep the calculated route points in your tcx file (most of it on windows only ):

1. Open mapsource and plan your trip using the routing function.
2. Save your trip as “Garmin GPS-Datenbankversion 3 (*.gdb)”.
3. Open WinGDB3, import the gdb file and select the export option “Convert routes to tracks with all route points”.
4. Use GPSbabel to convert the converted gdb file to tcx gpsbabel -i gdb -f in.gdb -o gtrnctr -F out.tcx.
5. Upload the tcx file to your garmin device.

The new swiss topo maps v2 for garmin devices appeared on the market some days ago.

I decided to get the new version. The maps are quite great and have a lot of details which make them very useful for biking, hiking or similar outdoor activities.

Unfortunately the company failed in keeping an easy installation procedure. Besides the exorbitant official price of CHF 398.-, it took me about 3 hours (!) to install the new map. (It’s still not working on OSX, whereas v1 seems to work).

Similar to the music industry, they try to protect their products. They chose complicated registrations, several different passwords, serial numbers and key generators. It’s no surprise I failed on my first attempt! So of course I also “lost” my first of two available keys (you can only install the maps on 2 devices).

There is no information about what will happen if I change/upgrade my operating system nor if I would get a new gps device (or it’s deeply hidden in the terms of conditions).

Of course there is openstreetmap which allows you to upload the maps of your choice for free. At some places they show even more details than on the original topo maps, but… there’s a downside. There are still large fields with a very poor coverage. But I’ll definitely participate in helping to fill this gap.

I’m definitely not ready to pay that much for a product with such an installation mess and annoying limitations while there is not even a running support hotline.

Let’s hope they get the learnings from the music industry!

As I mentioned earlier, I implemented a tool which extends your TCX course file for your garmin device (e.g. EDGE 705) by adding warning points when a hill is about to come on your trail. It’ll tell you how long and how heigh the coming ascent will be.

I started with a (preliminary) first version and then tried to do a better job afterwards by integrating the lessons learned earlier. Release often and early .

I did use less gauss filtering on the elevation curve. Just enough to filter away the noise but keep as much information of the original curve as possible. The strength of the filter is now dynamically changed depending on the amount of points given.

I do check the inclination to find out where the hill begins. If the curve goes up for more than 3% the start point will be set. 3% usually means you’ll start to think “oh it’s going up, isn’t it?” while you’re on the bicycle.

As soon as a part of the curve shows a negative grade I assume we reached the top of the hill.

I now have a list of possible hills (candidates). I group several hills following closely to each other, to one big hill. This threshold can be defined in the form. I made good experiences with values between 1000-2000m (which means that if a hill starts before 1000m after the top of the last one, it is added to the previous hill).
If left empty, the code will try to find out the optimum between 1000-2000m depending on the total distance.

In addition I remove the remaining low hills. The threshold can also be set, default value is 30m. So there won’t be an alert on hills going up less than 30m in altitude.

At the end I produce an image or a xml file. The xml file represents the TCX course file extended with the warning points.

That’s about it. I’m much more happy with the results now and think I’ll be able to use the tool in the near coming cycling trips!

If you want to be able to communicate with your Garmin Edge using Windows on Parallels on OS X, it is required configuring Parallels to attach USB devices to the guest OS, rather than letting both the host and the guest see the device.

You can change this settings in Configuration / USB Controller / Connecting Options -> Connect to Guest OS

So if you have problems connecting your device, check these settings!

If I compare the altitude elevation from my last running trip, I get very different values, depending on the software I use:

gpsies.com: 495m
Edge 705:   467m
Garmin TC:  578m

So which one shall I trust? I think I’ll just believe in my Edge 705 for the time being…

Garmin has updated its project Bobcat and renamed it to RoadTrip.

As I don’t use this software unless I have no internet connection, I don’t know if it’s really better. It actually looks the same as before.

A new version for my Edge 705 is available. You should use the Webupdater for updates.

I hope they fixed some stuff. My Edge restarted 2 times yesterday

Wie nett, hat mich Christof auf seinen Blogroll verlinkt. Ich überleg mir auch die Alpen-Challenge zu fahren. Im Gegensatz zu ihm, werd ich mich aber sehr spontan entscheiden, da ich seit ein paar Tagen an einer Achilles-Sehnenentzündung leide, und zudem keine Lust hab im Regen zu fahren (nach einer 4tägigen Sportpause wag ich mich morgen wieder auf eine lockere Runde Velo oder Joggen und weiss dann mehr zur Sehne).

Aber falls es jemand interessiert, Silvio vom Race Office hat mir den Link zum GPX Track für die Alpen-Challenge gemailt!