I have been using my Drivesmart 65 with Alexa trouble free for a couple years. I did not connect it to the Garmin Drive app during this time because I wanted to save the battery drain on my smartphone, plus I wanted all the audio to come out of the Drivesmart rather than use bluetooth to send audio to the vehicle speakers. I hate having music interrupted by the turn directions. This way the music plays uninterrupted and the turn instructions come out of the drivesmart at a lower volume. Recently I was caught in a traffic jam for two hours due to faulty traffic info. While creeping in the traffic jam I decided to fully use the Alexa features on the Drivesmart and install the Garmin Drive app. This should allow me to get better traffic thru the app rather than the HD radio traffic source. This week I installed the Garmin Drive app and connected to the vehicle and Drivesmart via Bluetooth. This caused the turn instructions to come out of the vehicle speakers. I went with this for a few days and tried to adjust to the turn instruction interruptions to the music on the vehicle speakers. I could not adjust. So I changed the Drivesmart settings to send it's audio thru the Drivesmart device. This took multiple attempts to make the audio to come out of the Drivesmart but finally it worked. This worked for a short time (15-20 minutes) until my wife instructed Alexa to play a radio station, as soon as she gave that instruction the Drivesmart went dead. At first I thought the 12v cord went bad and when we got home I connected the 12v cord from my other vehicle with no result the Drivesmart was dead. The only thing I could think of at this point was to connect the Drivesmart to the computer and try to connect to Garmin Express. After multiple plug and unplug of the usb cord and multiple presses of the power button the Drivesmart finally came to life again! I'm going to use the Drivesmart without connecting to the Garmin Drive app for a few days and if then everything seems fine I'm going to try to connect the app and Bluetooth again. Any setup instructions or advice?
