Wahoo BOLT/ROAM V1 GPS Units Reset 20 Years Back, Becomes Unusuable

(Finally, found a use for ChatGPT image generation that isn’t horrific!)

An ugly software bug reared its head over the weekend for owners of the Wahoo BOLT V1 & ROAM V1 cycling GPS units. Those units were first introduced in 2017 for the Wahoo BOLT V1, and 2019 for the Wahoo ROAM V1. The original ELMENT from 2016 is also affected, based on comments on Reddit.

In any case, the ‘problem’ here is relatively straightforward (albeit highly bad). The internal clock on these devices has reset to January 1st, 2006. Making matters worse, manually changing the time forward (via phone app), then is overwritten back to 2006 the moment the unit connects to GPS (because it gets/confirms time from GPS, and there appears to be a bug handling the time aspect there).

However, while you might think a bad-GPS date is only a minor problem, as always, when it rains it pours. The bad GPS date then in turn causes connection issues, resulting in wildly-random and impossible le speed values, constant pausing/resuming, failure to follow courses, and generally speaking, failure to act like a GPS unit. And of course, if you do get that ride finished, you get salt in the wound of having the wrong date on your Strava upload, back to January 1st, 2006.

While you can fix the date/time offset on your completed activity by getting the original file and using FitFileTools to change the date, it’s obviously a bit cumbersome. If you need access to that file, you’ve got a few quick ways of getting it:

1) If uploaded to Strava, you can download the original file on the left-side of the desktop site
2) If on the Wahoo app, you can export the original file to your computer/phone
3) If connected via USB to your Wahoo unit, you can do the same.

Then, on FitFileTools, you can upload the file, and use the Time Adjuster option to correct it. Once that’s complete, you’ll re-upload the file to Strava/TrainingPeaks/MapMyRide.

So, what’s the cause of the issue?

Well, Wahoo hasn’t quite confirmed yet, but the assumption here is a bug related to 1024, and specifically the number of weeks the 10-bit counter holds. In this case, it reached the maximum amount of weeks it could hold over the weekend, since January 1st, 2006, and thus ‘reset’. And this past weekend (yesterday) is exactly 1,024 weeks since January 1st, 2006. Much like Garmin’s GPS-related issues this past January, there’s a substantial amount of interwoven threads between ‘date/time’ and ‘Will GPS work?’. And when those threads break, it all goes to crap.

And what about the fix?

Well, it’ll almost certainly require a firmware update fix these three units. I’ve reached out to Wahoo, and they’ve already responded to confirm they’ve got my e-mail and CC’d a boatload of people. I’ll report back and update here, as soon as I have some more details on what a fix might look like in terms of timing.

Update #1 – Aug 18th @ 10:30AM Eastern: Wahoo’s cycling product manager says “We have all hands on deck working towards a root cause analysis that will lead to a firmware update to resolve this issue. I don’t have more of an update at this time but will share as we progress on resolving this issue. “

In the meantime, may I suggest going old-school style (I mean, older-school than a 2016-2019-era device), and riding without a GPS unit? I know, that’s speaking sacrilege around these parts. In any case, thanks for reading!

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