Garmin Edge 205 (and using it on the Mac)

Father Christmas brought me a Garmin Edge 205 for the bike(s) this year.

The unit is roughly the size of a mobile phone. It’s waterproof, Welsh hail proof (as determined during today’s ride), and can be charged from USB, so it doesn’t really matter if you pick one up from abroad.

Garmin Training Center

Garmin Training Center is the software that’s available for both PC and Mac. It’s on v3.smmat on PC, but only back at v2.x for Mac. Looking at the About information for the softwarem it looks like it’s been put together by none other than the folks at Omni Group, purveyors of such fine software as OmniPlan, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner Pro. Given that this is a particularly fine stable of software, I can only imagine that Garmin wrote their brief on the back of a fag packet for how they wanted Garmin Training Center to work on the Mac, and then OmniGroup sneezed the code out on to an iPod Touch.

It took Garmin quite a while to release a version of their software for OS X, and they’ve managed to upgrade the software in the meantime for PC users without keeping the OS X version in step. Nothing new there for most Mac users, but it’s a bit depressing that figuring out that there are an increasing number of Mac users out there is taxing Garmin – perhaps they should open up the source to the community :

Oh, the base map is absolutely rubbish for any purpose other than a very rough estimate of where you’ve just cycled in this version of the software. But no matter – there are other maps available out there, including Garmin’s own online services at Motionbased.com which rather handily supports Macs and has done since day one afaik.

Getting Route and Performance Data out of the Edge 205

More on this to follow, but in brief: you can use the Training Center to export a full .tcx file and/or use GPSBabel to read direct from the GPS unit and transform your routes, tracks and waypoints out to GPX for Google Maps or Google Earth.
Getting Route Data in to the Edge 205

So having managed a few runs just tracking my somewhat below-par performance, I decided I’d like to have a crack at predetermining a route and having it available on the Edge for me to follow. You can forget using the Training Center software for this, as all it will allow you to do is create a new route based on historical routes you’ve taken. Total cobblers.

No, for this bit of functionality, you’ll need to grab yourself a copy of GPSBabel and have that installed on your Mac. I’ll post a full howto as a follow up to this – probably to be written on the hop over the pond to Lotusphere. You basically need todo some Google Maps direction finding and then use GMapToGPX to convert the output to waypoints that your unit can use. Pretty simple really, and I haven’t got lost yet. In fact – the only time I disagreed with the directions the unit was telling me, I ended up being wrong and cycling further than I needed to.

Future Usage

Now I’d really like to try and use the Garmin Edge 305 with both the Cadence and Heartrate Monitor, but just can’t stretch to afford it given that I’ve only just splurged cash on the Kona, and then there’s the small matter of feeding/clothing the family and paying the mortgage. Trifling issues, I agree, but duties there to be fulfilled and complied with nonetheless. [Hey Garmin, I'm making eyes at you!]
Right about now Garmin will also be releasing the Edge 605 and 705 models which look set to be all swanky and colourful with their brighter displays and candy-coloured maps.  Again, I’d love to field test these on 2 counts: 1) they’re really great gadgets for cyclists, and, more importantly; 2) it gets me out of the house and away from the keyboard.

If you’re riding reasonably, you should really REALLY go and get one of these to replace your standard cycling computer. Check out EBay for bargain prices rather than breaking the bank on full retail.

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