Wrist GPS/Start tiumer

I went through this myself recently - but they still make the Foretrex. They just hid it really well on their website. I thought they quit making it too but I just bought one last December.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/prod30025.html
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/prod30026.html

What they don't make anymore is the version that had a sealed internal battery. Everything takes AAAs. I put dielectric grease on the battery contacts and a flexible non-permanant gasket goo on the battery door. It makes for a mess to maintain but it kept water out through a steeplechase and a rather windy Florida 300.

The wireless data transfer on the 401 is nice too...I can send routes from my handheld to the 401 without any cables.

Thanks Jake!
Ordered one yesterday

My 401 did really well on the 300 also and the battery case appeared to stay really dry without the goo. Now watch it leak this weekend 🙂

I still wouldn't trust it without the goo. I've already burned through something like 6 of those suckers. Either through salt water in the battery compartment, just stopped working, or adding it to Poseidon's collection.

I dipped mine in epoxy until I got a good 1/2 inch of thickness. it made it hard to press buttons but no water got in...only good for one set of batteries though. in retrospect, not a really good solution...

Garmin would do the world a favor if their line of waterproof GPS would use wireless induction charging of their batteries. That way you could seal the unit and not have to ever open it. I guess they'd sell more as you'd have to replace it when the batteries tired out and died.

smart butt. the 1/2 inch of epoxy much have been worn off by the time I got that one from you <img src="<>/smile.gif" alt="smile" title="smile" height="15" width="15" />

I'll likely never buy a phone that doesn't have induction charging. The phone I've got now has it built in, it's f-ing awesome.

I'm giving that a year for it to be integrated into everything really well...car, home, etc. In fact, I'm about done with being a tester on the bleeding edge of technology.

Jake,

I think you just made a joke there.. <img src="<>/wink.gif" alt="wink" title="wink" height="15" width="15" />

Engineering types like you (and me) will always fall for new and bleeding egde tech.. Fact of my life at least.

don't you engineer-types make the bleeding edge stuff?

So yes, it's like denying your very existence...

I want to spend more time making bleeding edge stuff and less time testing other people's bleeding edge stuff from which I only suffer!

okay, make me an app that give me VMG when I point the camera at a particular point (buoy, landmark, etc)

Or one that I point at the sail trim lines and tells me if I need to adjust it based on NEMA apparent wind.

Do you have experience with the Arduino system?
I'm thinking about using it for a winter project, maybe build a compass or GPS or something.

I do. I designed built a series of useless boxes using arduinos for the logic and servo control. I'm no expert with them but they are pretty straight forward. One piece of advice; pick a vendor that puts entire packages together (like adafruit). They test everything so you can be sure that the components are of decent quality and compatible. They also have software libraries that you can incorporate into your projects to use those components with simple commands while the library takes care of the complex programming tasks.