Front and Rear Derailleur Adjustment

Derailleur adjustment is one of the most common tasks in bicycle maintenance.  The derailleurs are what shift your chain from one cassette or chainring to another.  Below are two very informative videos on how to adjust your bike's rear and front derailleur.

Start with the rear first:

Then move to the front:

Hope these are helpful.

Downgrade Garmin Edge 500 Firmware

A few months ago, I was excited to find Garmin released an updated firmware version for the Edge 500.  Thinking this would help further perfect my little blue GPS I plugged in my unit and let Garmin perform their magic.  Well...I was mistaken.  The "update" not only required substantial more time for the unit to start up, but also had this terribly annoying bug where I would get random zero readouts for my speed during a ride.  I initially noticed this on trainer rides, but even after replacing the battery in my speed/cadence sensor I still noticed this was happening.  Yesterday the weather finally warmed up so I was able to take a ride outside and this random zero speed thing still happened during rides with the GPS signal turned on.  Well, all this got me thinking about reverting to the previous version of the firmware.  I thought this would be simple, but had a difficult time locating instructions on how to do so.  To make things easy, I am posting a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to do so below.  It is strongly encouraged to make sure your unit has a full charge before proceeding to change the firmware.

Step One: Decide which firmware you want to downgrade to and download it from here.

Step Two: Rename this .gcd firmware file gupdate.gcd.

Step Three: Connect your Edge 500 to your computer and power on the GPS.  Wait for the computer to recognize the unit.  This usually takes 10-20 seconds or so.

Step Four: Go to a file browser and find the Garmin GPS unit.  It will usually look like a removable storage device.  Once found, go to the Garmin subdirectory and transfer the gupdate.gcd file there.

Step Five: Disconnect the Edge 500 from your computer and power the unit on.

Step Six: If this is an older firmware version than the version you currently have installed, you will be asked if you want to proceed with the update.  Select "Yes".

Step Seven: Wait for the update to proceed.  This should take a couple of minutes or so.  After which, follow the onscreen prompts to set up and configure your unit.  To avoid having to redo the configuration, you can follow the instructions in step three here to avoid having to redo the setup, but I personally opted to start from scratch in case there was something corrupted in one of the configuration files.

If all went smoothly, hopefully you now have successfully changed your firmware version on the Garmin Edge 500.  Go out and ride to test it out.