How To Personalize Garmin Edge 810

Sport gadgets like fitness watch and cycling computer can be a personal toy just like mobile phone. It has all your fitness particulars, it tracks your exercises and health improvement over time. Getting it personalized to your liking maybe will motivate to exercise. To the very least, it helps identifying the owner when everyone uses the same device in a group, for instance, a group of riders using the Garmin Edge 810. 

I found a "hidden feature" while helping friends to load custom maps and clicking through each file and folder in the device. This hidden feature enables the 810 users to add a personal startup message during boot up like shown below...

Looks cool huh? 

It's very simple, much simpler than map loading:

• Plug in the Edge 810 to a PC.
• Browse into the Garmin folder in "Garmin Edge 810" drive (the drive letter may differ), as shown below...

• Double click to open the text file named "startup" (shown above).
• Add your message to the very bottom of the text file. DO NOT delete any of the content in the text file. For example, see the highlighted text shown below...

• Save and close the text file.
• Unplug the Edge 810 from PC and power it up. 
• Optionally, you can change the display time by changing the 0 in <display = 0> to the number of second you like. I reckon it's not necessary if the map is huge in size as the device takes time to load it. In my case, Edge 810 takes about 13 seconds to load the 125MB map file. That is good enough to show the personal message.

You can insert quote that motivates you to exercise more. Do take note on the screen size, longer text may not turn out nice on the screen.

I decided to change a little on my message upon completing this post...

:)

Enjoy riding!

p/s: I googled and realized that apparently this feature is quite known.