Originally Posted by
DrIsotope
You're not doing better than 10% per hour, you simply aren't. Because the Karoo continues to have deeply flawed battery management software, so the OS thinks the battery is dead when the gauge shows anywhere from 40 to 20 percent. I had mine do the "rapid drop to zero" from as high as 51% displayed. Thirty percent = zero seemed to be pretty common, my first Karoo could never, ever be trusted below 40% on the gauge. So I might average "ten percent" per hour for six hours, but that's all the Karoo would do. From 40% to auto shutdown, less than 2 minutes. So it was really using about 16.5% per hour. The actual mAh drained from the pack is irrelevant, because the Karoo thinks it's dead. So it is.
I was on the ATG from its inception, so it was normal behavior for me to let the battery run until it would go to rapid drain, every time. I had a 10,000mAh USB pack on the bikes at all times. Worst ever? 100% to rapid drain in 2h45m. Best ever? 100% to rapid drain in just under 8 hours. My Karoo was used to log around 250 rides, out of which ~40 were either errored (usually complete loss of one or more sensors,) corrupted (frozen during saving,) bad data, "eaten by device," etc. That's an 84% success rate, give or take. Everything I state about the Karoo is 100% objective. I logged in excess of 10,000 miles with it, unit on-time exceeding 800 hours. No guessed numbers, nothing from extrapolation. Just as my very first charge on the Bolt still had 16% battery remaining after 14 hours of on-time. I've never once had it drop below 20% charge before 12 hours of use.
Credit where credit is due. They could have fixed this by now. Every time I get an email asking me about suggestions for the next gen device, it's like the knife twists. I knew going in I was paying to be a beta tester. Turned out I was paying to be an alpha tester. It's been out a year. Forget all of the things we were promised-- basic functionality still isn't there. I hold out hope. But for now and the foreseeable future, the Bolt is my everyday computer. It just works.
I'm pretty confident I'm meeting the spec of 10 hours. I've run it down near the bottom and that's where it seems to come out.
Also, I'd have to say that if you haven't used it recently, then we're not talking about the same device.
I also have a Wahoo Elemnt and an Edge 1000. The Element is pretty near bulletproof but it's a pretty basic unit too and nothing I'd ever want to use for any navigation in unfamiliar terrain (you'd better have a phone with google maps handy if you do). If it didn't "just work" it'd be a loser because it doesn't do a lot either. That's what they get for the simplicity - strong reliability.
It also looks like Wahoo is kind of running out of gas - the ROAM is overpriced and under featured for sure. To me, it looks like Wahoo ran out of gas on their software development. That's too bad, the Elemnt is a nice product but maybe not all that extensible unless they disprove that on the next pass. For my daily rides, I'm taking the Karoo.
Yes, it's true - it shouldn't have taken this long. But I am glad to see Hammerhead making pretty good progress. While it may feel good to bash them for their past fooling around, not a lot can be done about that. If they have development moving in the right direction now, that's good and maybe they get somewhere.
Lord knows we need something else out there other than Garmin (and their mediocrity). Overall, the state of bike computers as consumer electronics probably places them as a class down near the bottom anyhow. Somewhere, somehow maybe someone will fix that larger problem.