A couple of weeks ago, a few eagle-eyed Slowtwitchers noticed that Garmin changed the Di2 battery field after an Edge 830 firmware update. This was part of a rollout for full 12-speed support that arrived today for Edge 530, Edge 830, Edge 1030 and Edge 1030 Plus head units.

Garmin introduced a new Di2 Battery field that can now show multiple battery status levels. The old Di2 (and general Gear) battery fields just displayed a single composite battery level. That worked great for 11-speed Di2 because it had only one battery. It was not so great for eTap users with 3 or 4 batteries. Some Slowtwitch readers noted that they lose granularity with the new battery bars versus percentage visualization. However, it now shows status for all batteries (each shifter and the main frame battery), so overall it is giving us more information.

The new update also presents front and rear gear data for 12-speed Di2 gear systems. This shows up on the “Gears” field that has vertical bars to represent the active front & rear gear. And it is on the Gear Combo field with appropriate options for 12-speed cassettes.

A quick note for the eTap folks… yes, the battery data fields apply to eTap and other ANT+ shifting sensors as well. This is a huge hurrah, because I have been burned a couple times when I forgot to replace an eTap shifter battery. Garmin rolled out 12-speed support for eTap a couple of years ago, so those user interface parts were reused. This update enables Edge devices to receive Shimano Di2 12-speed data.

Happy Spinning!