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

Hi MartinK, I was wondering, although the robot voice has its charms, is there an option to change to another type?

Thanks again for your fine efforts!

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

if you have not done so, please check out the following two posts: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=620, http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=622. It could be helpful.

Cheers,

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

Ah yes, right! I'll give it a try. Thanks!

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

You can check out the espeak CLI parameters documentation and the use it with the new manual espeak string editing described in one of my posts above. :)

BTW, I will probably make some of these parameters configurable in the automatic mode (like speed and and more male/female variants) in near future. :)

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

Martin, there seems to be a bug in the download code....

I had it set to download an area where I would not have internet access, and it completed the download OK. However, upon arrival, the area size I asked was only OK when zoomed out, the zoomed in levels were way too small.
It looks like the number of tiles was the same between zoomlevels, can that be?
I had asked 20km range (yeah, a bit too much), and at the lowest level that I asked (current -2) I got less than 1km

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

OK, I'll try to reproduce it and check why it does this.
BTW, what are you using for tile storage - files or sqlite ?
Woody also reported some problems with batch tile download & sqlite tile storage.

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

Thanks.... I'm heading far away with possibly no internet access, might be nice to have a fix before next saturday :)

Using plain file storage, so sqlite

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

OK, I'll make this my priority then. :)

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

ow sorry, I didn't want to put any pressure, just wanted you to know that if you find something and could be bothered to release an update before then, it would be nice. Not asking to drop what you're doing right now :)

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

Martin, is it possible to increase the debugging output when running modRana from the CLI.

Specifically, I'm interested in timestamps of when each tile is retrieved from the db and when it's displayed and any info alongside that...

This because the display on my device is still painfully slow, i.e. each tile cca 2 seconds...

I think it's somehow due to my phone setup, don't know what, but it seems somehow either there is no processing power to display the tiles or what have you... I'd like to debug it.

But the current output shows no hints that would lead me to any sensible conclusion.

The only thing that I thought was affecting it, is that I have the SD card encrypted and mounted via cryptsetup, but modRana's sql db is not residing on the mounted volume, so shouldn't be the case...

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

@MartinK:
First of all, thanks for Modrana! I'm playing around with it last two weeks and I'm positively surprised by progress since end of 2010 when I tried it last time. Donation was a must for me.

During the use I found one feature/behaviour that I'm missing.
It would be great if the menu>options>map>rotation and centering setting is saved per mode.

I.e. when in Car mode, I'd set the map rotation in direction of travel to ON and centering shift to Down.
If I would then switch to Walk mode, the centering shift would be set to don't shift and also map rotation turned off.

Reasons are simple, when driving fast in car, it make sense to see what''s ahead, while walking it's better to have 'paper map-like' view with north-up orientation and centered. (EDIT: without going to options menu every time)

The setting would be saved by just switching to desired mode and doing the change. When switching to other mode, initially the default values would be loaded, after the change they are saved for current mode. I hope it's described clearly, if needed, I can explain it in Czech too :)

Or, isn't this already available and I just missed it somehow?

I know I could ask for this via Ticket Tracker but I'm interested in what others think.

Thanks! Diky!

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

Great idea, it makes sense to me...

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

I have just released V0.25-4.
The main "selling point" will probably be faster tile loading - I now use the GTK idle loop (gobject.idle_add()) instead of a Python thread for tile loading. The tiles now load much faster than before - looks like there must have been some thread priority scheduling issues with the previous separate thread based method.

The screen is now also redrawn once a new tile is available - which makes it much more fluent IMO. :)

I have also added some debugging info during tile loading for jj0. :) You can enable it in options->Debug->Tiles.

The batch download is not yet fixed, but there are still a few days left before Saturday. :)

This is planned - in a generic way for all options where it makes sense - layers, sound, voice type, etc. I'm now working on how to implement this efficiently in the underlaying persistent dictionary and also how to integrate it to the UI in a way that does not confuse users. :)

Nice to know I'm not the only one from Czech Republic on this forum. :)

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

Martin, you have done an amazing job on this application.
Before my recent holiday, I figured that I would have to fork out for Sygic to get a decent mapping software, I gave modRana a try before hand and it has acomplished all I needed and more.

I will surely donate to you in the next coming days.

One question: I think we all agree that espeak is not great (though there is no real alternative), so would it be possible to use pre-recorded sounds for certain actions?

Being able to use advanced TTS such as AT&T Natural Voices would be great.
Though there licence would prohibit distribution.

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

No worries... but did you see (reproduce) anything?

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

when following the progress of the batch download, it takes sometimes lots of seconds for one tile, very variable speed.

I'm using SQLite storage and I'm on Wifi. What should be a normal download rate ?

It takes me now more than 2 minutes for 50 tiles. Verrrrry slow.
over a sample period of 150 tiles, it took on average 2.5 s for one tile ...

For the rest, very nice program, coming along strong in features and greatdeveloper responsiveness. Keep up the good wo rk!

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

Hi MartinK. I finally upgraded ModRana. Things seem to move along smoother. One thing I noticed is that I could no longer obtain the satellite image which previously had worked quite well. Am I missing something?

Thanks again!

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

Works fine here.

Are you sure you have selected a satellite map as an overlay?
Menu>Options>Map>Map Overlay>Background map = Google Satellite

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

I have never ever understood people who are able to listen that robotic voice anywhere. IIRC conversation about pre-recorded voices have been discussed in Nokia maps thread where people hacked default navigation app. There people posted some recorded voice files.

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

Ah. Yes, I had made a mistake. Thanks for straightening me out. The only thing now is the loading time seems much longer. I waited for over 3 minutes and it still hadn't loaded. The usual yahoo map seemed to load up very quickly and was very responsive. Perhaps there is something wrong with the google data. I will check again later.

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

You're not doing it over 3G are you?
Doing so would eat through your data plan tariff in no time.

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

I prefer the robotic voice to a mixture. And frankly, "Turn left in 700 yards" is a lot less useful than "Turn left on Filmore Ave", even if it mispronounces the name. (And mixing the two, the way the nav app patch does is worse.)

If there is an addition of solid playback files for simple directions, please make it optional! :)

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

I do not think the tarrif is an issue here. I was trying to use up my at&t pay as you go plan which is normally a slug (edge (2G?)). I had previously noticed that ModRana did fairly well with Google maps when using this at&t plan and was checking to see if the recent upgrade improved the process of tiling of the Google Maps as well. Anyways, I checked what was left on my plan before and after I had done the test. There was 13mb before I did the test and 13mb after so I think nothing, or very little data was transfered. Google maps would probably have eaten up a noticeable amount. So I will try again later. Regardless, thanks for your help.

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

I wasn't implying that the problem was down to having no tariff left, it was just a warning, because it uses so much data to transfer the images you could be hit with a nasty bill.
Normally, well over here at least, it can take a day or two for your statement to update with your recent data transfers.

If it isn't an issue with your data provider, then I don't know what it could be; maybe you could try deleteing your Google Satellite cache in /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/Google Satellite, to see if it downloads a fresh map tile.

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

I think I might have made a mistake in that the Satellite image I used to use was actually the Yahoo one. My bad here! But the good news is that the Yahoo version is working great! A big kudos to martinK here. I also tried the suggestion with Google Satellite but I still could not get anything besides "loading" on the screen", even using wifi, so something is amiss here.

By the way, I ate up 2MB testiing yahoo. It costs $15 per 100MB.
Thanks for the warning!

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

Yep, why not. :) But modRana currently doesn't know the turn type during navigation. It just gets a list of points with associated routing messages from Google - there is no turn type (left, right, 3. exit, etc.) metadata currently. But It is quite probable that turn metadata will be available in the (near) future - IMO Monav supplies it as do some online OSM based routing services.

Then It would actually make sense to add. :) BTW, If I remember correctly there was some talk about providing voice samples for Mappero but I don't know how it worked out in the end.

ModRana uses Espeak through the CLI - it could use any other TTS with CLI interface with very little modification - or even without modification provided you just switch to manual mode and modify the CLI parameters yourself (this is possible since 0.25). :)

No problem there - the users should be the ones that choose what to use, not the developers choosing in their place. :)

There are quite a few variables concerning tile download speed:

• * bug in my code - this is always a possibility :)
• network issues - congestion, packetloss
• overloaded tileserver - most tileservers don't actually store tiles from the lower, most detailed zoom levels, to save storage space - they generate them on demand - downloading such tiles might take longer than stored ones - and the tile server might actually start throttling your requests if you download too much at once

I've done this:
1. removed the OpenStreetMap I folder
2. selected the OSM Mapnik layer
3. selected sqlite for tile storage
4. switched options->network->Network usage to only for important data to simulate offline mode (this disables automatic tile download but not manual batch download)
5. started a 2 km download around "here" with all layers up & down - about 500 tiles
6. it was surprisingly fast in the begging but than slowed to a crawl - might be due to the tile generation for lower zl's, as described above
7. no tiles seem to be missing on lower zl's

This of course does not mean there is no bug - I have tested on only a small sample (2 km vs 20 km). The batch download currently doesn't handle failed tile downloads in any way - it does not re-download them, failed downloads don't even show up in the log. There might have been some network or tileserver issue during your long download that caused some of the tiles to be skipped.

So, what to do about this ? :)

• I'll add a counter of failed downloads to the batch download dialog
• make the batch retry failed downloads a fixed number of times

As a workaround (id like to push an update before saturday, but just to be sure :) ), you can just try to run a long batch twice - it should download any missing tiles. And you can check if you actually have the tiles by going to the semi-offline mode described above, before actually going into the middle of the Siberia and finding that you have no maps. :)

But I did spot an issue during this test after all - the radius is interpreted as a diameter. :D So if you set 2 km radius, modRana downloads a 2 km diameter -> 1 km radius. :) This is of course a bug and it will be fixed it (by adding *2 somewhere). :)

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

I don't know what I am missing, but if I modify the string to use an alternative program, it just doesn't seem to work.
I've tried calling a simple bash script which takes in the %qmessage% argument and just writes it out to another file, but nothing.

BTW, I have just sent a donation your way, albeit it is only a small one.
Student eh? :)

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

I just tried again at the location I'm going to, and after it downloaded 5445 tiles of the same zoomlevel, I couldn't scroll past the location I started at, the tiles just said 'loading'

Now switched to sqlite and re-downloading to see if that will work :/

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

These are the same problems I'm experiencing often, i.e. the tile loading slows down considerably, and sometimes just gets stuck, i.e. it just says loading...

A restart of modRana usually gets the tiles loaded...

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

I'll check it out - maybe it's working dirctory related ? I'd guess it runs the string in the /opt/modrana directory.

Thanks a lot ! :D


Yep :) I originally started to work on modRana for my Bachelors thesis - which I successfully defended about a year ago.


OK, I'll try to test with a larger download.

BTW which location & layer are you trying to download ? Maybe its somehow location or layer specific. Also does the same are show up normally with automatic tile download ?

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

Currently halfway through the download, I wiped all tiles and switched to sqlite.

The location I'm downloading is Taipei 20km radius, zoomlevel 16

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

right... this isn't ending well...

Using sqlite feels sluggish, and the downloading is even worse:
all tiles show as 'loading', if I press download, it flies through it and says all tiles are available.

So why do they keep saying 'Loading' ? I left it for quite a while and they don't load.

I also have lost some GUI icons, maybe this install got corrupted :((((

EDIT: apt-get install --reinstall fixed the missing icons, tiles still only load when there is an internet connection O_o

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

I have done a batch download of OSM tiles at zl 16 with 20 km radius around Taipei city center - it was quite slow (IMO too slow to be caused only by the tile server rendering the tiles) - but I haven't seen any missing tiles after the download finishes. The tiles evenly cover a rectangle with city center in the middle.
These are the resulting sqlite files, packaged in a zip file:
http://www.modrana.org/misc/osm_taip...0km_radius.zip

BTW, I have run all these tests on my PC - I'll check if it behaves differently on the device.

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

Martin,

Copied them but it does the same, being that the tiles just show 'Loading', not 'Downloading'

I think I'm moving back to file-based to see if that still works and is as fast as it was before.

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

something weird is going on.... the tiles it cached because I viewed the area load fine, those that I asked it to preload do not.

I did download using the 'Around view' button, assuming that means the area currently viewed...

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

Well, thats strange. I have just moved the same files to my N900 inside (I thought there might be some incomaptibility between sqlite files generated on PC and on device). Ive stuck it inside the path for OSM Mapnik files:
/home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap I
And they load just fine on zl 16...

BTW, are you sure you are viewing Taipei ? If your GPS is on, it might have switched somewhere else and without automatic tile download is quite difficult to tell what you are actually looking at. :)

And other idea - check if you have overlay on. If you do, it wont get the other tile to combine with and show "loading" forever.

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

very... I've created POIs for the stuff where I need to be and do a 'Show on map' to make sure I am at the correct area

I now have quite a few tiles cached manually, I'll probably try that way to start, and look to buy a 3G simcard locally to download on demand :/

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

Yes, it starts from a point that lies in the middle of the currently visible map. :)

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

I'm pretty sure the tiles are actually downloaded fine, it seems to be they are not loading.

I double-checked that overlay is OFF... Using Google Maps

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

You are trying to batch download Google Maps tiles ? IMHO they don't really like that - I wouldn't wonder if they just cut off access from your IP for a while, after downloading too many tiles in a short time (at least it works like this for Google Satellite tiles)... :)