Auto routing mid activity.

[olymay]

I hope this is the right place to post this. Mods, please move it if it isn’t.

I was out on a run through the local countryside this morning, not following any particular route, and decided to take a path I’d never taken before.
I had a rough idea where it went and was happy I would be able to get home.

However, as I went further down this new route, there were a number of forks and turnings and I was not sure which ones to take. This resulted in me needing to stop and check the maps on my phone to make sure I didn’t end up getting properly lost.

My request/ suggestion is this:

Could we have a feature on the watch (I have a Suunto 7 but I guess it could work on others too) that during an activity we can toggle a 'Take me Home (or other pre-determined point)" button that automatically routes you back to the start/ home.

This would have allowed me to carry on running this morning and rely on the watch to take me home
I know I can do this with Google Maps on my phone, but that is more of a faff than activating it on my watch, and would still need me to check my phone regularly.

[Mff73]

@olymay
Is there not the breadcrumb view ? Where you can follow your steps back ?

or you can save activity, sync with SA, create a route from there, and navigate back with a new activity or just navigation

[olymay]

@mff73 said in Auto routing mid activity.:

@olymay
Is there not the breadcrumb view ? Where you can follow your steps back ?

Yes, absolutely. And this works really well if you want to go back the way you came.

However I prefer to run a circuit and that is what I was doing this morning

[isazi]

If a watch can do that, it’s probably the S7 cause it can have offline maps.

[Mff73]

@olymay said in Auto routing mid activity.:

@mff73 said in Auto routing mid activity.:

@olymay
Is there not the breadcrumb view ? Where you can follow your steps back ?

Yes, absolutely. And this works really well if you want to go back the way you came.

However I prefer to run a circuit and that is what I was doing this morning

Ah ok, i didn’t catch your point. But would you rely on an auto route back without having checked the route on a map ? me i wouldn’t
But as @isazi said, maybe S7 is intelligent enough to help you do that.

[DMytro]

@olymay great request, but I’m not sure it’s possible. Komoot on a phone can’t manage offline routing on offline maps, I’m not sure about other services. It probably has to do with where other users normally go or something that can only be done online to insure the best navigation experience.
But maybe it would be possible to piggyback on phone’s connection if present.

[Brad_Olwin]

@olymay I have not tested this yet, but if you have cell service you can draw a route and push it to the watch, then use the route. That is the only way to do this and routing on the watch might be tough!

When I travel I have used the S7 for something similar but, I simply change the map to heatmap mode and just follow a heatmap track. That has worked very well for me and no need to load a route.

[olymay]

@Mff73 you’re right, I wouldn’t blindly follow it, especially if somewhere new. But it would certainly give me a starting point and I would hope that my own common sense would stop me getting in to danger.

@DMytro why would it not be? The S7 downloads the local maps for offline use when it charges (and connects to Wi-Fi), so it has all of the data it needs to calculate a route.
Google maps can calculate routes when off line, it just can’t take into account live traffic data etc (which shouldn’t be an issue in the middle of fields).

@Brad_Olwin it’s my understanding that the watch only downloads new routes when it is charging and connected to Wi-Fi?? I did a run recently and revisited an older route I hadn’t run in a while but removed the turn by turn navigation as I didn’t need it on this route anymore. However, it would not update the route until I put the watch on charge.
Even if this did work, it would still require me to fish out my phone and create the route, which is what I am trying to avoid.

@isazi agreed! The S7 has the offline maps, so in theory could do something like this. My main worry is that all of the routing is done in the Suunto App on the phone and then transferred to the watch, so it may need some quite serious reworking of the watch software to make it happen.

Maybe something for Suunto to add into the next generation of the S7???

[Mff73]

@olymay
I use Locus Map on phone, with offline maps and BRouter with offline routing.
With that and SA able to sync route to watch whenever I need, l am ready.
But OK, it is not automatic

[olymay]

@mff73 said in Auto routing mid activity.:

@olymay
I use Locus Map on phone, with offline maps and BRouter with offline routing.
With that and SA able to sync route to watch whenever I need, l am ready.
But OK, it is not automatic

So you can sync a route to an S7 without it being on charge or connected to Wi-Fi? How do you do this?

If I need to start using apps on my phone then I may as well just launch Google Maps and get that to navigate me to where I want to go, as it shows the direction on the watch nicely and will give me spoken directions through my headphones if I’m wearing them.

I’m hoping for something that I can trigger from the watch, it will route me a pre-defined place (home/ start/ etc.) and off I go, no worries about getting lost.
I’m happy to wait for the S7mkII (or whatever it’ll be called) if there are limitations. Just wanted to get the request out in the wild, as it were

[isazi]

@olymay at the moment I am pretty sure it’s all done by your phone, probably via the MapBox API online, so yes it will need lots of work, and I have no idea if it’s the goal of Suunto or not.

What I wanted to say is that asking this for the other S line watches would be impossible because they have no mapping capabilities, so if a current Suunto watch should be able to do it is the S7.

[Brad_Olwin]

@olymay As I said the watch will sync routes offline, this is for all S-series watches that have routing capability. As long as the route is on the phone simply sync to the watch and it will appear on the S7. If you do not have offline maps downloaded for the area then a map will not be present, but if they are downloaded the map will be available as well. I just tested this, it works. You do not need to be connected to a charger, cell service or WiFi. The charger connection is for map download, which also requires WiFi or a hotspot.

[pilleus]

Great idea! Offline heatmap navigation to a special point (choosable on the display of the S7).

[olymay]

@isazi I think you are right in that it is all done on the phone. It might be too much for the current generation of S7, but it is something I would love to have in the future.
Creating full routes on a watch would be a nightmare on the small screen, but the ability to pick a spot (either from the map or a pre-selected home/start) and have it route to there would be really great

@Brad_Olwin well I’ll be damned! It works!! I was always under the impression that the watch only synced routes when on charger (and Wi-Fi). This is GREAT news that it can sync over the air (and pretty much instant from my very quick test just now!).
Whilst this isn’t quite as elegant as my feature request, it will definitely work for me in these situations. Thank you

@pilleus yes, this would be great. Although sadly there aren’t many heat maps where I live

[Egika]

@olymay what the watch only does when on the charger is to download the maps around planned routes.
If you plan a route far away from cached maps, it will load the route but not the maps around it.

[olymay]

@egika thanks

I always thought that the watch needed to be charging and Wi-Fi in order to download maps and routes, but I am really pleased that routes can sync over the air (every day is a school day!).

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

@olymay yup, this is awesome and it seems it works this way in whole S series (routes sync). I sometimes use it by simply pressing a point on the map, selecting that it’s destination point and SA will automatically create a route from my position to what I’ve selected. It may not be optimal but it’s automatic and it works with fast sync to watch also (there’s even no need to pause the activity).

What I miss however is that POIs won’t sync the same way which is strange.

[olymay]

@łukasz-szmigiel yeah, this is fantastic! I didn’t realise it works like this on other S series devices as the S7 is my first ever Suunto.

Agreed, it’s not the most optimal, but it looks like it will work well and will be close to ideal for me going forward.
Obviously a ‘Navigate to…’ feature would be great, but this is more than good enough for now

[Nigel Taylor 0]

What would be REALLY good would be…

In the phone app, where you click to create a new route, in addition to being able to toggle the heat-maps, you could toggle visibility of an existing defined route.

My perceived use-case for this is based on what happened two weeks back >>

I ran a 50k ultra, I had the route on the Watch (and also had my phone with me), BUT, I hadn’t activated to follow the route…as I was assured it was “well flagged” and plus you weren’t really supposed to use navigation aids.

Anyway - went wrong a couple of times, as you do at these things, but retraced steps and not a big deal, all part of the adventure of a long trail run…but at about 20 miles in, I was running and engrossed in chat with someone, so not really concentrating…and we followed some markers from another event entirely, and ended up running about 2 miles off course, before we realised, AND, whilst we then realised the exact place we’d gone wrong, we really did NOT want to retrace back the full extra 2 miles to try and pick up from exactly where we’d gone wrong…we thought we could just navigate to ‘a near point on the actual course, that wouldn’t result in us having to cover lots of extra distance, but also wouldn’t mean we’d short-cutted’.

We did this navigation in our heads via the Suunto App on the phone by opening up the route, & clicking edit (so we could see our current position), and just ran to a near point on the course, and I guess could have also manually navigated similarly by just loading the course map into the Watch and then zooming out.

But - it would have been really good to just create a new route, overlay the race route like a Heatmap, pick current location as start, click a desired point on the overlaid route as the end, saved that to Watch and then followed the resultant Nav to get back on course.

(my measured distance ended up being an overshoot of 1.65miles compared to the 50k course distance - due to the combination of going wrong for an elapsed 2miles distance, but then being smart about where rejoining the course - which seemed fair! We didn’t shortcut, but were ‘efficient with our long cut’!!)

[Aleksander H]

@nigel-taylor-0 only thing I want from the routes feature of the app is to say “make me a 10km (ish) circular route starting at the following position.” . Now that would be sweet when in unfamiliar places.