Pat: Hey, Pat McCartle back for another episode of Shop Talk where today it's all about RIDE COMMAND. Stay tuned to this episode for more.
[music]
Hey, welcome back. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking all about pre-ride planning and what you're going to be doing before your ride. Now, remember in the description below, we've got a link to a previous RIDE COMMAND episode we did that's going to take you through a lot of the features on your vehicle, but this one's going to be way more about what you're doing before the ride. So, I've got my good friend Matt here. And Matt, why don't you tell these guys what it is you do at Polaris?
Matt: I really work on all RIDE COMMAND features from our mobile apps to our websites, even some of the things on the vehicles.
How to Use the RIDE COMMAND Website to Plan Your Ride
Pat: Nice. So, clearly you've got a laptop and a phone sitting here. Let's jump in on this laptop and show people kind of how they can get going, you know, the day before the ride, right? When you're at home in the shop. Let's talk about some of that pre-ride planning. All right. So, what website do you have pulled up here?
Matt: Uh, what I've got pulled up here is the RIDE COMMAND website. So, it's ridecommand.polaris.com. Once you go there, create a free account that allows you to save any of the content — planned rides, track rides, waypoints — all that content gets saved to your account together. It's completely free. Go ahead and create an account there. Get logged in.
Pat: Nice. Now with that account — same account for your phone, your laptop, and your vehicle, right?
Matt: Exactly. Same account across all three and all that data syncs up to the cloud.
Pat: So once you've got it saved in one spot, it'll kind of seamlessly go between them as long as they have an internet connection.
Matt: Yeah. You create something on the web, it's right there on your phone; save it on the phone, goes right to the web. No problem.
Pat: Nice. All right. So, where are we looking at on the map here?
Matt: Uh, so we're zoomed in here on a spot out near Moab. It's got a lot of cool trails out there — cool features that are an awesome spot to go plan a ride. So, what I wanted to show you guys as we zoom in a little bit more here: you can see all the different trails, waypoints, camping spots — all these different waypoints that are here. A new thing that we've added recently is now the ability to actually go into this 3D mode that really shows you a lot more information as you're trying to plan. Like what's the elevation look like? Is that going to be difficult? Is it easy? Where are cool spots I want to stop? All I'm doing is holding down the control button on my keyboard. That works both on PC and Mac. Just hold down that control button and you can really pan this view all around.
Pat: Nice.
Matt: And then the other thing that adds a whole another dimension to that as well is turning on the satellite map. So now we can actually see exactly what this terrain looks like.
Pat: Nice. So you can see the river, where the peaks are, where the valleys are. That's awesome.
Route Planning with RIDE COMMAND on Existing Trails
Matt: So we're going to start out. Let's jump into this spot right here and we're going to click on plan ride. This is a good parking spot right here along the river. Easy to get to from the road. So we're going to click off-road on that. And now we've started our planned route. So, you can see over here we've got the first point, which is that parking lot. And now what I can do is just click anywhere on a trail.
Pat: And now, as you're going, I see you zooming in and out here. And it's quite fast. You're just scrolling the wheel on your mouse, right?
Matt: Exactly. Just using the scroll wheel. That'll work. Whether it's a scroll wheel, whether it's the pinch to zoom on the trackpad — any way that you want to zoom.
Pat: Normal zooming in a website, basically.
Matt: Exactly. So, I'm just going to click a few spots along this trail. And as I'm doing that, you can see it is automatically snapping my route to the existing trails.
Pat: Yeah. So it starts with a straight line, and then if there is existing track there, right, it's going to fill it in and actually follow the established route for you.
Matt: Exactly. And you can see this trail comes and ends right here. If you were just looking top down, you might not know why, but in this 3D mode, it's really cool. You can actually see this is a great spot to stop and, you know, maybe have a snack or something like that because it's a cool overlook.
Pat: Nice. Now, obviously, you've got the ability to change this name from just a GPS point to something else. Let's say that was going to be our lunch stop.
Matt: Yeah. So, let's just rename that "lunch stop."
Pat: And now that'll show up — once we get it on a vehicle or you pull it up on your phone, that'll be a waypoint, right? That'll say "lunch stop." So, it's easy for everybody to identify what the heck we're going there for.
Matt: Exactly. So, then we can continue our planning. If we just keep clicking spots along the trail network here, it'll keep snapping. Maybe we want to go, you know, check out this spot over here.
Pat: Yeah. Now, on some of these spots, like if you go back to your left a little bit, it looked like there was almost a couple loops in here. Now, I'm not sure if they connect or not, but let's say we actually want to kind of run the ridge line and go this way around instead of, you know, kind of coming this way around. What do you have to do to be able to change that track and get it to auto connect down the other way, if you will?
Matt: Really easy to do. You can just move your mouse over any spot on this path and just drag it to where you want it to go. And then once I let go, it's going to reroute that and make sure that it goes through that exact spot. So it's really easy to make sure — maybe even this spot again — I want to go over this spot, stay along this ridge. I can just drag that over there. It's going to keep snapping to that exact spot.
Pat: Nice. So super easy. Even if it routes a different way, but you know, hey, like I want to go the other way — just click and drag.
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: Nice.
Matt: So yeah, we can just add another point over here. And maybe that's where we're going to end. So I'll rename that just "the end."
Pat: Clearly you're going camping at night.
Matt: Yeah.
Pat: Not ending where you're starting, huh?
Matt: Uh, the other thing we can do — say you're going to share this out to other people that are going to go on your ride. I can change the color of this. So maybe I want to make this one red, just so it's really visible in this type of terrain. Once I make that red and I share this out to somebody, it's really nice to be able to just say, "Hey everybody, follow the red line on your map today." So now we've got that route created. We can actually give this a name as well. Let's just call it "Moab camping"…
Pat: …camping trip.
Matt: …and we'll hit save on that.
Pat: All right. So now once you've hit save, that'll sync up from your laptop up to the cloud and be ready to pull down on kind of any machine or device that you're logged into.
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: Okay. Now, clearly we started out looking at Moab where there's a lot of established trails, right? A lot of good routes that you can auto-route to. Now, let's say we get to a more remote area where maybe you've got private land you're riding on. You know, there's some established trails, but they're not in the RIDE COMMAND ecosystem. Can you take us on an example that shows that — like, you know, maybe you've already gone on a ride a little bit, but you haven't gone everywhere, but if you look at a satellite view, you can see, hey, there's clearly trail here that I can ride.
Creating Custom Routes with RIDE COMMAND
Matt: Yeah. And that's a really cool feature that we have built into the system. So just like Pat said, if we've got somewhere that maybe it's some of your own private land, that kind of thing — somewhere where we don't have any trail data, but where you've got your own tracks, maybe you've gone out and ridden your vehicle — these blue lines would represent those tracks from the vehicle that actually synced right to your account.
Pat: Nice. All right. So if we want to plan a ride here, same story, right? Click plan ride in the bottom left corner of the screen, then off-road, and then start clicking.
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: All right. So click our first point.
Matt: Yeah. Make sure you're pretty close to it, right? So it can pick up that track. Exactly. And then we can just keep going by clicking that next point. You see it snaps right along exactly what you already had.
Pat: I was going to say — maybe make that a different color so they're not both blue.
Matt: Yep. So we can do that. So let's — top right.
Pat: Yeah. Easy. All right. Now, let's say instead of continuing on to the right here, we want to go up and get out to the water. So kind of a new track for you.
Matt: Yeah. Exactly. So what we can do is just start clicking in those spots where we want to go. And you can see it changes the line. Instead of solid, now it's dashed, which means it's not actually snapping to anything that it knows about. So it's just allowing you to draw out exactly what you want. All I'm doing is just clicking a bunch of spots, using the aerial imagery here to just click along exactly where I want to go. And maybe I've got my own little camping spot out at this lake here. So again, I can get to there and I can say "camp on this spot," hit the check mark on that, and we can save this to our account. So now we've got that ride planned out and ready to sync to our vehicle.
Pat: Nice. So super simple. Each time you click, it's basically going to draw a straight line segment from the last spot you clicked and just keep extending that along.
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: Okay. So now we've got these synced up to the account in the cloud, right? So now if we want to pull these up on a phone — like say we weren't using a laptop, or maybe we did this the night before, but we want to kind of share with the group real time. If you bust your phone out now, can we see — I don't know which account you're logged into, but either the Moab ride or this more remote one?
Using RIDE COMMAND on the Polaris App
Matt: Yeah, both of these are on the same account. So all we need to do is just pull up the app, and once it gets loaded up, we go to our rides tab. I'm just going to pull to refresh on that. And you can see our new routes just popped in here. So this route nine, the one that we just planned out — I can tap on that. And here it is. Exactly what we just planned on the laptop synced to our account. All the same information here. I can pull this up. You can see our stop name of "camp." Everything right there, ready to go.
Pat: Nice. Now, if we wanted to get from camp back to the home base where we started, so we can get back to our trailer — can you show modifying that on the phone, and then we'll sync it back up to a laptop and then eventually get it pulled onto a vehicle?
Matt: Yeah. So, really easy to do on the phone once you have the ride opened up. I just tap on the pencil icon here. And I want to say "modify route." We got all our stops and everything at the top just like on the web version. You can see our stop two is over there. Just for simplicity sake, I'm not going to redraw all of that part, but I can just tap there. It's going to draw that same line. I'm going to add that point. And then I can come over here, maybe add another one over here and drag that exactly where I want it to go. Hit add on that. And then let's make one more back at the beginning here. I can hit add again since that's a stop that we've already started with. And now it routed us. You can see right kind of back over our exact same track. I'm going to hit done. We can give it a name if we want. Let's just leave it as route 9 for the moment and hit save on that. And now that is saved on our account. We've modified it right out there in the field, right from our phone.
Pat: Nice. So now that should be synced up to the cloud as well, right?
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: So if we refresh your laptop, we should see that come back up.
Matt: Yep. So all I need to do is refresh this page. It's going to give it a second just to bring everything back up.
Pat: Yeah. Look at that. Exactly what you were looking at on the phone, right? Because it's got the route out, the straight line back, and then routed on the established trail that you had there.
Matt: Exactly.
Pat: Nice. All right. Now, this is probably a good spot. So we've got this track in the cloud. Now, we've got a Sportsman and a Ranger in the shop. What do we need to do to be able to get this data from what you planned onto these machines?
Syncing Your Planned Route to Your Vehicle Display
Matt: There's a couple of ways to do that. You can do it either through a USB drive, but the easiest way is actually just to log into your account right on the display on the vehicles as well, and it'll sync all that information right down.
Pat: All right, so we're jumping over to the Sportsman now, and we're going to show you guys how you set up Wi-Fi tethering. So, at first we've got our iPhone here and we've got the Wi-Fi hotspot turned on. So, maybe we'll kind of show you what that screen looks like on one of the newer iPhones that we got here. And now, Matt, as we start clicking in on this display, what do we need to do to be able to connect up to this hotspot?
Matt: Yeah. So, on some vehicles it'll be through Wi-Fi. On some it'll be on Bluetooth, like Pat said. This one has Wi-Fi. So, what we're going to do — if you want to come on over — pretty simple. We can either tap the Polaris icon on the top or this one over on the right. We go into "all settings." And then under "general," there's this line for Wi-Fi. So, we're going to tap on that. Turn Wi-Fi on. And now we're just going to wait for it. You can see it pulled up my iPhone right away. So, we're just going to tap on that. We'll go ahead and put in our top secret password here.
Pat: We'll block some of it so you guys don't know Matt's password. So, in case you ever happen to be next to him in real life, you can't steal his Wi-Fi. All right. Connected.
Matt: All right. So, it's all connected up. One way that you can actually tell if that is connected — if we jump over to the map, you can go in here and turn on one of these map layers, like the satellite map, and that'll actually start loading in that satellite info, and that way you know you're connected.
Pat: Nice. All right. Now, we got to get logged into your account on here next, right?
Matt: Yep.
Pat: All right. So, where do we have to tap on to get to your account login so we can actually show these guys what that looks like as well?
Matt: Yeah. So, very similar. We can tap on either one of those Polaris logos. Go into "all settings" again. We're going to back out of Wi-Fi. And now this top line item called "account" — when we go into there, tap on "log into your account," and we just start putting in the exact same email and password that you would have used on the laptop or the phone.
Pat: Okay. So, in this case, your account ID is just your email, right, for most everybody at home. And that's pretty simple and easy to do.
Matt: Yep.
Pat: So, hopefully you guys remember that, right? And if you ever forget, you can log back in on your phone or your laptop, hit the "forgot" button just like you would any other password. It'll send you a note to be able to reset that. All right. So, you got this thing logged in. You got your password on. Now, I see this option that says "sync to account." And I'm assuming we're going to want to turn that function on, correct?
Matt: Exactly. So, that's off by default, but once you come into your account, just turn that on. It's going to take a little bit, especially if you've got a lot of rides or waypoints — content in your account. It'll take a little bit to sync that all down the first time. Once it's all on the vehicle, though, subsequent times that you start it up and it does that sync, it'll go pretty quick.
Pat: Yeah. Now, when we think about this from an ecosystem of how this data is getting to this Sportsman right now — it's all stored up in the cloud. We've got the hotspot on your phone turned on, right? So, it's going cloud down to the phone, and then kind of tunneling into this vehicle. And holy cow, these tracks are ripping up like it's just racing now. Look at this. I don't know if you guys can see this on the camera, but I mean, tracks are cranking up, places are cranking up, routes are clocking up here. So there's a bunch of data on this account, right? Because you've been using it for a few years now.
Matt: Exactly. All right. So now it says "last sync just now." So all of our content is now on this vehicle. That will work now completely offline. So if you're on this vehicle out in the middle of nowhere, all that content that synced will be there even if you don't have connectivity, even if you disconnect your phone at this point.
Pat: Nice. Now, can we show these guys — like, back at a map — how they can find that last route that we actually planned on the phone and the laptop so that they can see that on vehicle?
Finding Your Planned Route on Your Vehicle Display
Matt: Yeah. So, we're just going to click on this button. We're going to go to map. This little tab at the bottom — that's how you get to the various map content. So, if we tap on "rides and places," that's where all of the content that just got synced is all here. So, you can sort by date or name, distance, that kind of thing. So like this route two — that is one of the tracked rides that we just saw in that kind of private land area example that we showed. So, I can tap on that. It'll actually zoom me right over to where that is. And if I zoom in, you can see that exact same content. And that area that we were just at is all right here on the display.
Pat: Nice. So, Matt, now that this thing has synced to everything that's on your account, can we actually show the route that we just planned on the map and how to get to that screen next?
Matt: Yeah. So, really easy. We can tap on either the Polaris logos here or on the side, and we're going to tap on "map." Once we're on our map, this little tab on the bottom — you tap on that to bring up all your map controls. We're just going to go to "rides and places." Here, we've got our tracks and our routes and our places, which are just waypoints. I'm going to go to routes. You can see our route 9 has already synced. So, what I can do is just tap on that, and it'll bring me right to the map exactly where that is. You can see the red line.
Pat: Nice.
Matt: Exactly what we planned.
Pat: All right. Now, what are all the different ways that we can get this route from your account and the Sportsman over to my account in this Ranger?
Transferring a Planned Route Between Vehicle Displays
Matt: Several different ways. One of the easiest is actually just right from the phone. When you've got that in there, you can actually share right from the phone from my account to yours. All you have to do — bring up this little menu on here once you have that route opened. I'm going to tap on "share" and then I'm just going to tap on Pat to send him that through messages. So, I'm going to send that over. That should get right to your phone.
Pat: Boom. All right. Now, easy enough on my side. I got a text that just showed up from Matt. And you guys can see right here — here's the link to Route 9. Awesome. It tells me everything — all the ride stats about it, distances, where it's at. Yeah, this is pretty sweet.
Matt: Yeah. So, once I send that to you, you actually just tap "save" on that. It'll save a copy of that to your account. So, if you're logged in on your vehicle now, that'll just sync right to your account. The other way we can do it is — say you're somewhere where you don't have connectivity, or out at the trailhead, and you just want to be able to get that to the other vehicle where you don't have connectivity — is actually to do that through a USB drive, which is pretty simple as well.
Pat: So, good news — I happen to have one of those handy because this is the method I generally use when I'm out at events and I got to transfer to like 10 different vehicles, none of which are logged in. But install your USB stick and then what do you need to do next on the screen?
Matt: So, I'm going to go into that same tab on the bottom of the map page. Go to "rides and places." In the top right, this is our import/export button. Over on the left here, we've got "to USB." There's also "from USB" if you want to import, but we're going to go to USB to export that. Over here, we've got our same list of tracks and routes and everything. So, I'm going to tap on routes. We're going to select route 9.
Pat: Now, I think there's maybe a couple other fun ones. We can get the Moab one and maybe this Woods and Trails one and hit that copy button. And it was that fast. I mean, I got all three of them on that stick ready to go.
Matt: Yeah. And even if you really want to get crazy, there's a "select all" button just to dump everything on there.
Pat: Boom. I don't need everything. I only need a couple because you got 500 things on here and I don't need them all.
Matt: So now we can jump over to the Ranger and do the exact same thing in reverse order to copy that right onto the Ranger.
Pat: All right, let's go.
Setting Up Bluetooth Tethering in Your Vehicle
Pat: All right, so we jumped in the Ranger and the next thing we want to show you guys is how to set up Bluetooth tethering. And it's important — kind of the order of operations you go on this, right?
Matt: It is. So I'm in my settings menu on my Android phone here. First thing I want to do is go to my network and internet. And I'll go to hotspot and tethering. And you can see I've got Bluetooth tethering turned on. It's nice if you actually do that as a first step before you pair in Bluetooth, but we'll show you how to deal with it if you didn't. Then I'm going to go to connected devices here. And I'm going to hit "pair new device." And then on my display, I'm just going to tap on the phone button here — "add a phone or headset." And hopefully in a minute or two, you should see that my Moto G phone will show up on the display. And I can just tap right on that to get the connection and pairing going. You'll see that number shows up. I'm going to hit pair on my phone. And assuming all things are working, I get some options if I want to allow access to messages so that it'll pull up names if I'm getting texts and phone calls and that type of thing. But you can now see on my phone it says that I'm active. And right down here, it shows that I'm connected.
Pat: Now, pro tip, Matt — if you forgot to turn the hotspot on first, what do you need to do to make sure it actually works?
Matt: Yeah. So, you can just make sure you go turn that on on your phone. And then back on the display here, I'm just in the settings for Bluetooth devices. What you can do — you can see Pat's phone here is connected. If I hit "disconnect," that doesn't unpair it, it just breaks the current connection. Once that is disconnected, you just tap on it again. And now, because he's got that hotspot turned on, it'll be able to pick up that connection.
Pat: Yeah. And the easy way to know if your connection's actually working — hit the map button, go into the map layers and then turn on satellite maps, because the only way you can get those satellite maps to pull in is if you've got the internet connection. And quite clearly here we can see boom — all the farm fields are showing up around the area that we'd expect. So, working just like it needs to. So the next thing I want to do then is go to my settings. So I'm going to go to all settings here and then under general, down at the top, you can see "account," and I'm going to log into my account. All right. So, I got myself logged in and you can tell because my account ID is now in gray. And now I'm going to turn this sync on. And you can see my tracks, places, routes, and areas are all at zero. I don't actually need my phone — it could be in my pocket just as easy as up on the dash here. And in just a minute here, you'll start to see these numbers will start clicking up as we go. Again, we got tracks, places, routes, and areas. And we're looking for this route number to keep going up, because that's actually what Matt shared with me. So when that gets to, I don't know, eight or 10, we'll probably be close enough that we can jump over to the map and check it out.
Matt: Yeah, let's go take a look at the map. Map tab. Rides and places.
Pat: Rides and places. All right. So, data can go. We'll go to routes here. And boom — route 9, the one that just got shared with me. We're going to tap on that. And you can see it zoomed, pulled me up to that area. We got the route right up to the water. You see, I don't have the rest of the tracks that Matt had on his, because those were his personal ones. He didn't share those with me. But super nice here, right? I can see this whole route. I can see where it starts, where it is off the road going up to the water. But super easy.
Syncing Planned Routes to Your Vehicle Display via USB
Pat: Now, the other way we talked about sharing was with that USB stick. So, we've actually got it plugged in in the glove box right now. So, we're going to go back to "rides and places" here. We're going to click on those double arrows. And then, in this case, we're going to go "from USB." So, you can kind of see USB arrow going down. And this should pull in kind of all the different areas that we've got here. Now, I'm going to go — instead of being old to new, I'm going to go new to old. And you can see route nine, but I'm going to want to get, you know, the Moab Overlook and the Woods Fields because those aren't on my account right now. I'm going to hit copy. And just like that, those ones will load right into my display. And if I want to go — whoops — to the routes there. Once I click on a couple buttons here, I can see the Moab Overlook. I can tap on that and I can see — I'm not anywhere close to here, but this is actually the route that Matt had planned that we loaded in on his account and now we can share via USB. So, pretty cool ways to get this on.
Matt: Yeah, a lot of really comprehensive features there to be able to plan out your route, make sure everybody's confident when they're out riding and can be on the same page with where you want to go.
Pat: All right, Matt, just want to give you a huge thanks for joining us in the shop today. Clearly, you gave us a huge education on how to plan on your laptop, how to get it on a phone, how they sync back and forth over the cloud, how to load on Wi-Fi tethering on the Sportsman, Bluetooth tethering on the Ranger, sharing back and forth with a USB stick. That's it for this episode of Shop Talk. Make sure you guys like, comment, subscribe. Let us know what you want to see next time. And in a future episode, we might just be out on the trail showing off the group ride and some of the advanced features that you get for after the ride as well.
