Launcher, settings and other apps were deleted, time reset

Hi,
as first thing I want to express my excitement when I noticed that recently so much development has taken place which makes the Bangle a really serious device.
I just want to report this strange behavior that occurred to me yesterday. I had recently installed the new GPS Service Widget and also the BangleRun app. Because last weekend the GPS was not working for me before I went out for skiing yesterday I checked and updated both apps and also updated the GPS data with AsisstedGPS to get a quick fix. Then I went skiing, started BangleRun and after a while I had a fix. I had BangleRun turned on the whole time and when I came home I put the watch on my desk. In the evening, when I wanted to change some settings, I received the message that the launcher was not found.
I do not know what caused this and thus do not know how to reliably reproduce this issue, but wanted to point this out here.
Now today just before writing this I want into the App Loader to check on the watch so I can give a precise description, but what I found out was that some apps including BangleRun, GPS Service and Gadgetbridge amongst others were just gone. Also the locale settings were deleted because time displays wrong by -1 hour. Other apps like Weather widget are still there.
Now I have no explanation for this, just an assumption that BangleRun must have overwritten something when logging the track. That is the closest guess I can make.
I'll try to reset the watch now, reinstall all the apps and see if that can be reproduced (and I hope it was an exception).
Sorry I cannot provide any more helpful details.
Update: Just let me add that I am sure I was using firmware 2.08, flashed in November based on the file date on my tablet. Reflashing now anyway …

Thanks! Hopefully there's more coming as well :) Are you on 2v08 firmware at the moment?

Thanks for letting us know, especially with all the details. This issue got brought to me attention recently, and could be related: https://github.com/espruino/Espruino/issues/1970

Is there a chance you were using 'GPS Recorder' or some other app that might be writing to files as well as BangleRun? What can happen is if the Storage gets full, it'll 'compact' to free up some space. Usually that's fine, but if you have an open StorageFile (and it wasn't that file which caused the compact) it'll stay pointing to the old location and could overwrite some existing data.

I plan to get that fixed soon, but if you manage to get it to happen again, please let me know. There's always a chance it could be due to something else.

Hi Gordon,
thanks for the quick reply.
Yes, I have read about that issue too but was not sure it was related. Based on the current weather forecast it does not look as if I get the chance to go skiing again anytime soon, but I will use the next opportunity to try to reproduce what went wrong.

So I took the opportunity to go skiing again today.
I had my Bangle setup fresh and installed the GPS Service widget and BangleRun.
One observation I made is that when after more than one hour I decided to stop recording the track, turn of the GPS service and started BangleRun again, the app had no GPS signal. I was surprised because I thought that the app would either use the service when available or start GPS itself.
Given that I had used GPS just before I decided after about one minute that th app apparently needs the service to have GPS active and reactivated it.
In the end I have one conclusion: There is a GPS fix but it does not update the GPS data.
I have three logfiles, one from January 28th and two from today, all are attached. They show that the position GPS service reports is not my actual position (I am not in India but in Germany). My actual position was 50.8103972N, 13.9369142E when I started the logfile "Bangle.js Track banglerun_210131_094218.gpx".
The position when starting "Bangle.js Track banglerun_210131_120558.gpx" was about 50.8066767N, 13.9229108E (give or take 200m, they do not have winter pictures in the maps app).
At first glance I cannot see anything obvious as to why the difference. Especially the difference for the longitude are strange.
Heart rate has been recorded, so apparently BangleRun logs properly.
I'll go skiing again tomorrow and will remove the GPS service to see if that changes anything. Hopefully we can nail down the issue.

1 Attachment

• Bangle.js Track banglerun_2101.zip

Wow, that's very strange. Have you since deleted all the track files? It might be helpful to have the raw data from Bangle.js if you still have them on the watch (you can download them via https://www.espruino.com/ide/ and the Storage button) so we can see if it's being recorded wrong, or simply converted wrong to GPX format

turn off the GPS service

I think this might be an issue with GPS Service - I believe when GPS is set to off it actually forces GPS off (which means it will no longer work in other apps!). I'll see about putting in a change to fix that that.

Hi Gordon,
a small update. I removed the Low Power GPS Service widget and only used BangleRun app. Same result. The app got a GPS lock, but the data is similar to yesterdays. And it was not updated during the run.
I had updated the GPS data yesterday with the AGPS app.
After I initially reported this issue I loaded all default apps which is supposed to delete all the date, but to be honest I wondered why some GPS track recordings were still available at that time.
I wanted to load the raw data but I do not know how to find the Storage button in the IDE.
Please advise and I will provide all data I can.
Attaching todays two files.

Hi - I don't see the attachments at the moment. Actually I know BangleRun had some changes recently, and I wonder if those broke it. I have giving it a real-world test on my list of stuff to do, so I'll take a look at that now.

Ok, just tested and BangleRun is broken. Sorry about that - I'll see if I can figure out what's wrong

Ok, try now! (version 0v08)

This one should be significantly better - just tried here and it's at least getting the right coordinates now!

Hi Gordon,
I just took a small walk out and yes, it gets the coordinates correctly, but does not update them.
I have also looked into the IDE help file and just cannot find that disc button the help refers to, so I have no idea how to download any data.

If you go to https://www.espruino.com/ide/ you should see an icon like the attached - once you click that you can then see a list of files and can click the eye icon by the file to view it. However since I can reproduce here I don't think you need to worry.

Ok, thanks for letting me know about the lack of updates. @singintime do you have any thoughts about this?

Personally I'm tempted to pull out the code which updates lat/lon/alt - so the Kalman filter still works for distance/speed/cadence values - but ensure we log the raw GPS data from the GPS.

1 Attachment

Hi Gordon,
thanks for the reply, and believe me or not, but yesterday I did not have that icon displayed.
Today I have and I can assure you that the raw data of a banglerun logfile has the format

timestamp,latitude,longitude,altitude,duration,distance,heartrate,steps

and the values for latitude and longitude do not change.
If you need a specific file please let me know, but you are right, if you can reproduce it there is no need to use my files.

Just to help nailing down the issue I just:

• activated GPS service
  
• installed and activated the GPS Recorder app
  
• for optical verification (and out of curiosity) installed and ran the Alpine Nav app
  
  

Having taken a short walk outside I can tell that GPS data is updated and correct, so the problem really is with the BangleRun app.

Ok - thanks! If you need to record your GPS trace then there's always GPS recorder.

For now, I have just removed the Kalman filter - so if you update it should all work again. At least it seems to from everything I can see at the moment.