My Garmin Edge 810 crashes when navigating. Does yours do this too?

[paulzak]

In my experience, Garmin has been pretty good about fixing bugs in the Edge product line. Some might argue that they take too long, but better late than never.

My Edge 810 crashed whenever I was navigating with it. I reported the problem to Garmin and was directed to reload the firmware. I did this multiple times and took a firmware update but the unit continued to crash. Eventually I returned the unit to REI, but I'm left wondering if it was only mine or if all exhibited this behavior.

Thanks for contributing your answer.

[JayH]

What do you mean by crash, would it reboot or would it freeze or display some error?

I have an old Garmin Nuvi somethingorother. It's a car GPS system and it would occasionally simply reboot itself out of nowhere which is basically a software crash and was fixed with later firmwares so yes, mine used to crash when it was new and it still does occasionally, but now with a lot less frequency...

Not sure if this helps you, but just my two cents..


Jay

[mdxix]

I struggled with the Edge 810 for a few months and finally decided to give up. I replaced it with the 510 and never looked back.

I found the 510 superior to the 810 as follows:

• Sensitive (GPS + GLONASS)
• Very simple to operate without the worries about routing—just use tracks
  
• Reliable (all works as expected)
• Small package (tiny compared to others)
• Long battery life (I can run it for almost two full days without a charge)

These are in addition to the standard functions in 810 & 510 for recording all trip data (laps for multiple trip sections, fitness data, HR, cadence, temperature, grade, etc), wireless phone connectivity (for Live Tracking, download routes from Garmin Connect, and upload activities to Garmin Connect).

[gwinrow]

Yes, sounds like my 810 works just like yours, had it for 2 months now and it crashes 3 or 4 times every hour I use it. I've had 3 firmwares on it, none of them worked.
Really disappointed as it's great when it's working, follows downloaded courses, showing your route on the map, sounds alert tones when approaching junctions and when you wonder off-course, I'm still hoping a firmware update will make it work.
Garmin support were not very helpful, just told me to reset my device.

[redcatcher]

My 810 would lock up during a ride and I'd have to force restart to get it going again.  This was this past summer and I found on another site that this particular problem was not uncommon.  The solution, at least for me, was to turn off Auto Power Down under the System tab in the settings menu.  I've ridden several hundred miles since and the only issue has been operator error.  Great device. 

Hope this helps.

[OldDogBC]

Good Morning!

I will start by saying that I am not an expert in GPS technology nor map building but I have used a Garmin 60cx quite a lot for mapping and data collection in my job. The 810 was a bit of a departure from what I had expected from a Garmin product given the advances in the GPS world and mobile devices in general. My current tech standard is the iPhone: You turn it on and it works.

I received my Garmin 810 as a Christmas present and was very excited to get it on the bike. I was exceptionally disappointed in my early experiences. Pretty much everything in that first couple of months was not a good experience: Getting Garmin Connect on my computer, downloading base layer maps from Garmin, updating Firmware, syncing with my iphone, Live Track not working, route building was cumbersome, the unit wouldn't follow a route, etc... Bad experience with almost no help from Garmin Tech support "oh, yeah, we are having issues with downloading...we are working to resolve that...we are hoping to have that fixed in the near future..." I would have returned it if my girlfriend hadn't gone above and beyond with that as a gift. I had resigned myself to just using it to track my training rides like I had been doing for free with Endomondo. Then...

Garmin must have fixed something with recent firmware and software updates. Combine the updates with my upgrade from my trusty iPhone 4 to a 5S and magically everything seems to be working much better! Syncing and Live Track have been working as advertised!! Route following seems to be better on routes generated through tracking on the bike but I haven't yet given the unit another shot at following a route I built on Garmin Connect.

I still have a couple of complaints: Nothing intuitive about merging the mini-SD card with the 810's internal memory and route building on the Garmin Connect site is not point-to-point navigation friendly. That last issue will be very important as I continue planning for a tour next year. It would be great if Garmin would integrate some of the mapping features that Google allows like dragging the route to another road or trail option. It may be operator error but I have played around with the routing and it just doesn't seem to be simple nor intuitive.

So, more to the point of your thread, I haven't experienced the crashing you described but plenty of other issues. Garmin is the defacto world leader in GPS devices and they have a cycling team yet the 810 comes to market with all of these challenges. I still believe in Garmin as a company but maybe they should find a way to hire someone from Apple to run their device / integration division...

My apologies for rambling. If anyone out there has suggestions for me on the route building I'm all ears...or eyes I guess.

[ko6yq]

I found this discussion by a web search after I had a similar-sounding situation with my Garmin Edge 810. Mine crashed 12 miles into a ride - like it turned itself off except the auto-off was disabled and the battery was charged. When turned back on, it seemed to have lost the ride data and forgot that it had been navigating. Then on the same ride it crashed the same way as I pulled into my driveway another 25 miles later. In both cases the graphical interface showed no ride data after restart. But I found the GPX files more or less intact on the memory card, except for the expected file truncation where the crash occurred.

I was using navigation on that ride. As I looked around the web I saw people were having similar problems during navigation. So I put more scrutiny on the memory card which had the maps. And I found it had some minor filesystem damage, probably from the previous owner's usage over the course of 2 years. Mounting it on my Linux system, I ran the FAT filesystem repair (fsck.fat) - it found and repaired some minor filesystem damage with an inconsistent backup copy of the FAT table. (If you use other OS'es, there should be FAT filesystem repair tools there too - I just can't tell you what they are.)

So far on test rides with navigation in the week following that, I have deliberately been using navigation on every ride to test it. So far, no more crashes. This is looking good enough to tell others about it as a potential solution.

Filesystem damage like this can result from unsafely unmounting the SD card from your computer or when the GPS crashes or shuts down from low battery.