Hammerhead Karoo 2 – new features

Hammerhead seems to get new features onto the Karoo 2 every month and this month was no exception. Sometimes the updates are minor, sometimes huge and sometimes ‘notable and interesting‘, like this month.

Must Read: Hammerhead Karoo 2 Review

Full software notes

One step toward Climb Pro

Previously you could display the upcoming elevation profile of your route but now if you deviate from your route then a new upcoming elevation profile is displayed for your re-routing. To a degree, we have here a dynamically changing of what hill is coming up.

Of course, Garmin does a similar thing but specifically gives a ‘mode’ where you are provided with stats and graphics for the current or next hill. I hope Hammerhead is heading towards a similar end goal and today’s move is probably a step toward that.

ANT+ Light Support Improvements

aka Garmin Varia RTL 510 RTL515 support

Hammerhead has supported Garmin Varia for a while and recently fine-tuned some of the audio-visual behaviours of the original feature. As of today, your smart lights can be configured to turn off/on when you turn the Karoo off/on.

Of course, Garmin Edge units already do the same thing and now you can too in the sensor details on the Karoo.

More Map Screen Layouts

This was another of my mini-bug bears as previously there were more restrictive options for which data fields could be shown alongside the map. Now you can add up to 4 data fields, which is enough for me.

Mixed Units

This is a weird one that bugs me when I use Google Maps to navigate in my car. I want to know big distances in miles and shorter ones in metres. For some reason, I’m less bothered when cycling and am happy to be fully metric but some of you like to slice and dice your metric and imperial measurements. Now you can. I can’t think of anyone else that does this…there probably are a few.

Sensor bug fix

Both the Karoo and Wahoo ELEMNTs suffer from cake shop syndrome. Meaning that after you’ve had your carrot cake and espresso, you jump on your bike and get pedalling only then to find that the head unit won’t reconnect to a sensor (power meter) that has been asleep. The solution on Hammerhead and Wahoo was to page across to the sensors screen but in winter with gloves and when cycling in a group this wasn’t always easy. Anyway, now it’s fixed and I’m happy.

4iiii Viiiiva now supported

This is a weird one too. The legacy 4iiii Viiiiva is a bridging heart rate monitor which took ANT+ sensor data and rebroadcast it as BLE for your phone/watch/head unit. I’m guessing that this will help give you a BLE channel for Zwift. Obviously Karoo supports all modern ANT+ and BLE PMs

“Xert EBC for Karoo” Support

This isn’t mentioned in the firmware release notes but Xert has told me that “Xert EBC for Karoo” was also released. I already had Xert up and running on my karoo (image below), so I’m guessing this is a modified Android APK specifically for the Karoo (rather than just any old android phone). That would make sense as the fonts with Xert on Karoo didn’t seem quite right to me previously.

Play Store: link

App Organisation

NExt there is a new, slightly improved way of accessing and organising apps. You can see the old way in the image above with Xert at the bottom of the main screen. Now all the Hammerhead apps can be accessed in one single place

Like this…

Take Out

I’m happy about all of these as they are all features that I either use a lot or at least touch on from time to time.

Recommended Reading: Hammerhead Karoo 2 Review