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Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1342002)

Another thing I noticed: There seems to be a discrepancy (at least in some circumstances) between the sizes reported as transferred and remaining on the device, in the batch download page.
...

Yes, this is known and has been discussed before in this thread (which is rather long) and has to do with the tile file size and the file system. To remedy this you can use the sqlite database (built -in). It is in options - map - tile storage. if you set it to sqlite it will use much less disk space.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Another remedy is reformatting MyDocs with smaller allocation blocks.
But please keep in mind two things:

1. The smallest allocation block you can achieve on such a large partition is 8KB. Better than the default 64KB that's for sure, but given that the average tile size is about 4KB, you still waste about 50%.

2. Smaller allocation block means there is more of them. Which means that the FAT is bigger and more RAM is used by the file system cache, leaving less RAM available for applications.

Unless you intend to share the tiles with other applications, your best option is using the sqlite database as Whispering Weasel suggested.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by Whispering Weasel (Post 1342055)

Thank you very much. I remember the sqlite discussion, but I didn't know it was the cause of what I was seeing.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by pichlo (Post 1342068)

I understand, thank you for pointing that alternate route to ameliorate the problem. I will proceed by using the sqlite database for tile downloada.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

I've run into a little problem. I grabbed the car routing data for the US West region directly from http://modrana.org/data/monav/north-...est_car.tar.gz

Then, I stored the resulting folder (us-west) into the path specified in the wiki, and the data files end up in:: /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/monav_data/us-west/routing_car/

But I can see no preferred pack when I try to add it in the modRana Navigation > Routing data options. Yes, I restarted modRana (and the N900 itself) a few times, and I don't see anything wrong with permissions, which are 777 across the board as far as I can tell.

MartinK mentions here that compatible data packs can be obtained from monav.openstreetmap.de, and I see that there the us-west archive is not divided into the different modes (car, foot, etc), but comes as a single file. That's why I used the other link, and now I'm wondering if there is some problem with that file.

I searched this thread for this issue but I didn't see anything. Any ideas?

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by magic_doc (Post 1341587)

Hi MartinK,

thanks again for your great work and congratulations for the android-version.

Thanks ! :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by magic_doc (Post 1341587)

May I dare to ask if there is any chance to get the messed-up gpx-tracks displayed correctly in the future?

CU Michael

Good point, I really should finally fix that. Hopefully it shouldn't be that difficult (basically just recognize where the segments start/end and start/stop drawing them accordingly). :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1341989)

I've done my first experiments and I'm very impressed! I'm using modRana 0.41.1(GTK version).

A couple of questions:

....

- When I am setting up the batch download of tiles, I clicked to calculate the size. When it calculates the size, it looks like it keeps calculating the full size (I suppose it downloads and deletes every single tile?) It would be better probably to just estimate by downloading a representative number of random tiles and then extrapolating (sorry if that's the way it already works, I might have not waited enough).

It is a bit more efficient than downloading the tiles - it downloads just the headers and checks the size field. It does really check all files though - which is not much usable for very large sets. BTW, if it also finds some that some tiles are available from local storage, it removes them from the batch.

Anyway, I like your random sample idea - that could really work quite nicely in most cases ! :) Picking say 1000 tiles at random and extrapolating from there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1341989)

- Another comment regarding the last point: When it is calculating the size, if you click back to exit the menu, the application becomes nonresponsive and needs to be closed. I guess the threads that are downloading / calculating the size of the tiles are still running.

Thats weird, I'll check it out. The threads should be daemonic, so that when their parent quits, they should be automatically killed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1341989)

Great program! I think I'm going to use it for the first time tomorrow. :)

Thanks & good luck on your travels ! :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1341989)

Talking of which, does Google really disable batch downloading of tiles? Because that sucks. Anybody knows how to get around that?

Martin, I just had a cool idea: Since Google disables batch download, but downloading tiles in normal use is allowed, wouldn't there be a way to simulate a route that would cover all the target tiles? Unfortunately I suppose you would have to run the route as many times as the zoom levels you have selected, and change zoom level at each pass. And, the route would probably be huge and hard to compute. A strange benefit is that this would take less space, because it wouldn't download tiles that you wouldn't see during normal use (tiles for places unaccessible within the view distance for the range of zooms selected). Also, you might have to be observant of the speed at which the route is run.

I think the algorithm Google uses for baning is much more simple - probably just user-agent & number of tiles downloaded per second. Also, the Google Maps web interface seems to download tile sequentially/in order, so they might also try to detect that.

There are some improvements I plan to eventually implement for batch tile download, that all have legitimate uses, but might be useful for users wanting to work with Google tiles:

custom user agent support
As a good behaving application, modRana correctly reports it's user agent as:

Code:

"modRana flexible GPS navigation system (compatible; Linux)"

Some enterprising users might want to set it to something like:

Code:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Linux)

If anyone wants to experiment with the user agent already in hte current modRana version, it is set in

Code:

/opt/modrana/core/configs.py

on line 190. :)
Note that you need to be root to edit this file.
limiting the number of tile download threads
custom/Random delay between tile downloads
support for tileserver mirrors
Most big tileservers, including the Google ones have 3 or more mirrors. This is mainly due to some Javascript threading limitation, but using multiple mirrors from modRana might be handy. :)

BTW, modRana supports downloading tiles around a tracklog or current route. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by malfunctioning (Post 1342245)

Looks like a regression - I'm having the same issue. I've done some changes in how the path to the routing data folder is "computed", which might have triggered it. Hopefully should be an easy fix. :) BTW, thanks for reporting this! :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Well, why not ? :)

modRana 0.41.2 has been released ! :)

Changelog:

Code:

* Thu May 09 2013 Martin Kolman  - 0.41.2

- fix modRana not showing monav routing data packs

- if map folder path is redirected by config file option, the Monav routing data folder is also using the redirected path

- new option for disabling (almost) all animations in QML GUI

 - the option is in Options->UI

 - when enabled, page switching becomes ridiculously fast, even on the N900 :)

 - dialog animations are still ON, as there doesn't seem to be a clear way of switching them OFF

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by MartinK (Post 1342480)

Well, why not ? :)

modRana 0.41.2 has been released ! :)

Changelog:

Code:

* Thu May 09 2013 Martin Kolman  - 0.41.2

- fix modRana not showing monav routing data packs

- if map folder path is redirected by config file option, the Monav routing data folder is also using the redirected path

- new option for disabling (almost) all animations in QML GUI

 - the option is in Options->UI

 - when enabled, page switching becomes ridiculously fast, even on the N900 :)

 - dialog animations are still ON, as there doesn't seem to be a clear way of switching them OFF

Thank you so much, MartinK! That's an amazing turnaround for a problem that you just became aware of.

Also, your advice as far as customizing the configuration in order to attempt to be more successful downloading the Google maps is awesome. I'll have to give that a try.

I didn't know that the procedure to check the size for batch downloads also removes tiles from the batch if they are already available. That's very smart of you, and very convenient (great way to resume interrupted downloads). A random check would probably lose this benefit I guess, so maybe give the option for strict and random check to the user? Just an idea.

Your program is so flexible, and the ability to select from a number of maps as well as stuff like tile downloading and offline routing is so great, that today at work I felt a little like a wise man amongst iPhone owning fools. A (humble) donation is forthcoming. And good luck with your Android port, you deserve to be successful!

I have also been using Mieru, by the way. Great program as well! Reading Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron in my spare time. ;)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

Quote:

Originally Posted by MartinK (Post 1341529)

I've recently fixed some GTK threading issues, so batch download should now be faster and should no longer slow down if there are no GUI changes going on.

I have unsuccessfully tried to download around my area, as large as possible with max up and max down, three times so far today.

Everytime the device reboots after a few minutes.

I am using sqlite if that helps but also had the same issue with original storage.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system

@sixwheeledbeast, I've never had much luck with max-up-max-down downloads. At best the device became so sluggish that it made an impression of locked up (e.g. took 2-3 minutes to register a screen tap), at worst it rebooted. I assume the reboot was caused by the watchdog, but I might be wrong.

I have not found a workaround yet. I've tried batch download with JTileDownloader as suggested by Estel a few pages back but it took 5 days to download the whole of UK up to level 13. Given that level 14 has twice as many tiles as levels 0-13 combined, I gave up at this point.