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

ModRana V0.29-1 has been finally, FINALLY released !! :D

Whats new ?

• Wikipedia search (via Geonames)
  • results include a 300 character abstract, accessible by clicking the on map label
• Wikipedia and address search results can now be used for routing and saved to POI
  • multiple result handling
  • on map clickable label
• two click map layer selection
  • also used for the navigation language selection
• fast mode switching by pressing the menu icon for 400+ ms
• values of option items can now depend on the current mode
  • EXAMPLE: disable map rotation when in cycle mode but enable it in car mode, different map layers, etc.
  • it is possible to list all per mode states for an option
• individual options can now be reset to their default values
• better readable text in POI and Search result detail menus
• fixed GPSD problems in latest SHR (not really relevant for Maemo)
• fixed a few menus where pressing the back button would not trigger a jump to map screen
• the height profile now shows imperial units on its Y-axis in imperial unit mode
• various backend fixes and improvements

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

great work!

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

I'm getting the message "Loading saved options failed" on startup of Modrana. This was also so in the previus release (began when I upgraded to the previous release and continues in this release).
I removed Modrana, removed and then replaced my battery after 5 minutes and restarted my N900. I then re-installed Modrana but the problem continues. What must I do to correct this issue?

Thanks,
David

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

Looks like a corrupted options file. Removing or renaming /home/user/.modrana/options.bin should fix it. :)

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

Well that answers that... the file doesn't exist. I'm not familiar enough with the N900 terminal to create that file (don't know that I could even create a .bin file from the terminal) so how does one go about adding it to the /home/user/.modrana/ directory (I'm already root)?

Thanks also for the rapid response to my previous question.

Cheers,
David

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

No need to create it by hand - the file contains a (binary) dump of modRanas settings dictionary and should just be autogenerated if not present.

Things to check:

• the ownership/permissions of the .modrana directory might have been somehow screwed to not be writable for modRana
• delete the .modrana directory - it should be also regenerated automatically and important data (POI database, maps, tracklogs) is stored elsewhere
• run modrana from the terminal (as user, not root) and check/paste here the terminal output

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

Here is the result of my attempt to remove the directory:

" /home/user/.modrana # rm /home/user/.modrana/
rm: /home/user/.modrana: is a directory
/home/user/.modrana # rmdir /home/user/.modrana/
sh: getcwd: No such file or directory
(unknown) # rmdir /home/user/.modrana
rmdir: '/home/user/.modrana': No such file or directory
sh: getcwd: No such file or directory
(unknown) # "

I can cd into /home/user/.modrana, but when I try to rmdir it suddenly doesn't exist...

The problem does seem to have been corrected by the rmdir attempts though (the terminal's output of the attempt was odd), so may be solved and thank you to MartinK for your work on Modrana and for taking the time to assist me in correcting my problem.

Respectfully,
David

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

Is ther multirouting, multistop routing for the newest version? Can somebody please post the link for the update because modrana has not been able to pick up my gps since I installed it from the apps manager about a year ago so I havent used it much. if it doesnt have multirouting, can somebody include that feature? Thanks in advance.

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

MartinK, is Clutter coming anytime soon?

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

There is a bug in the new layer settings code. To reproduce:

• Menu > options > Map > Map layers
• click on toolbox icon
• click "per mode state list"

the layer settings for each transport mode should be displayed.

Now click on the toolbox icon again and click on "per mode state list", now nothing happens. Clicking on back arrow toggles between the two attached screenshots. The only way to exit this loop is to use the application menu at the top.

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

Thanks! I have managed to reproduce this, should be an easy fix. :)
BTW, there actually should be no toolbox icon in the per mode state list just for this reason.

Now for the older questions:
As a public transit API from Google seems to be nowhere in sight, raw GTFS support might indeed be the only way of supporting public transit search/routing. Or maybe is there someone other than Google providing search over the publicly available GTFS schedules already ?

Batch download uses persistent connection to limit the (otherwise astronomically high) amount of open connections due to the huge number of tiles and their small size.

I might also enable this for automatic tile download, provided it brings some improvements, like faster tile loading.

As for some tileservers not supporting this - should be easy to solve by adding a few variables that enable/disable persistent automatic/batch download for a given layer to the map layer configuration file.

This is planned together with importing POI's from GPX files - for example, Cloudmade has huge POI database extracted from OpenStreetMap in in the GPX format.

The current module used by modRana for loding GPX seems to also support KML.

The API modRana currently uses supports this, but there is just no GUI for it yet.

Try to reinstall modRana ?

I have used Clutter for the currently released version of Mieru for Fremantle - while it is certainly usable it, Clutters performance is still not exactly stellar. Only version 1.0 is currently usable on Fremantle, while upstream is already somewhere around 1.7+. The newer versions require newer version of glib than what is currently available and need Gobject introspection for Python bindings, adding another heap of dependencies.

Thus to current plan is to use Qt with QML due to better availability on Fremantle, Harmattan and elsewhere.

Architecture

• QtGraphicsView for the main map widget
  This should bring better performance, enable things like fake a 3D, sprite markers, fluent rotation and zooming, etc.
• QML for the various menus
  What about finally having some kinetic scrolling, button feedback, etc. ? :)

As for the current GTK based UI, it should stay as an alternative for devices that don't have (recent) Qt libraries, like the Neo FreeRunner.

Implementation
The first thing to do is separate the GUI code from the modRana core (currently represented by the modrana.py file) and enable GUI switching and thus also serious alternative GUI development.

Anyway, might be quite a challenge but IMHO worth it due all the potential performance and usability gains.

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

Great, please disable persistent connection for google map. I would rather put up with slower but automatic downloads than scroll around for hours downloading it manually :)

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

Request: to search poi saved to the phone offline. when I travel I normally saved alot of poi in the phone but sometimes having hard time to remember which category I put it. thanks

modRana on Android
 

Hi all:

Anybody using modRana on Android?

Just got a Droid 3 phone, so that I can run GNU/Linux via chroot on it, running debian unstable, quite snappy, better/faster than the N900, the keyboard is also better.

Don't really want to mess with the Android spyware system too much... But would like to run modRana on it.

Basically, there are two options:

1. Run modRana in the Android system, for this I just ran a quick search, and it seems to me there is no python for Android, I was quite stumped. Is this really the case, or just bad searching on my part?

2. Run it within the debian chroot. Anyone tried this? Just so that I don't waste time hacking with it, can it use the Android hardware, most notable the GPS module? It seems to me, Android uses some non-standard, from a GNU point of view, device files etc. so modRana might not be able to use the GPS...

Anyone have any info on this?

EDIT: OK, seems there is http://code.google.com/p/python-for-android/ so will investigate that. Would probably prefer to run modRana within the debian chroot anyway, so as not to mess with all the Android stuff...

EDIT1: Ohoh, modrana depends on liblocation0 to manage GPS functions, this is a non-free Nokia binary right? WTF, meaning it cannot connect to GPS outside of Nokia?
It runs smooth on the Droid 3, much faster than the N900, but obviously no GPS functions, so not very useable. Is there a way around this Martin?

Not worth messing with python-for-android, as modrana is not gonna be able to connect to GPS without liblocation0 there either...

Re: modRana on Android
 

ModRana only uses liblocation when running on Maemo 5, on other platforms it uses gpsd. I'd guess as the chroot is based on regular Debian, gpsd should be available - if it can get data from the actual GPS hardware, well, thats another question.

To make modRana use gpsd, run the modrana.py with the argument of neo or q7.

So for example, like this:
BTW, can you provide some photos ? Would look nice to have on the modRana project website. :)

EDIT:
Provided modRana gets no GPS data from the gpsd in chroot, there might be another possibility.
If you can find a way of getting the position data somehow iside the chroot (like some app outside from chroot writing it to a file and then reading it from inside the chroot, etc.), I can write a special "android_chroot" device module to handle this and possible other quirks of running of the Android chroot.

Re: modRana on Android
 

Oh, what a relief, I'll investigate this further.

OK, will try in a bit.

I could, though am not sure with my setup it'll be anything special, I'm a hardcore GNU/Linux guy, i.e. I run StumpWM within the chroot, so no window effects, no tiling window, nothing, so modRana looks exactly like a fullscreen modRana on the N900. Anyhow, if you want some fancy stuff, I guess I could start up fluxbox or something and open some windows and then modRana... OK, let's get the GPS stuff fixed first though...

OK, I'll investigate if it can use GPS.

If not, I'll work with you on this, so we can get a workaround like you mention, for that I'd have to first figure out how GPS services are interfaced in Android etc. but should be doable...

I'll be back later with the results of my interim tests.

Re: modRana on Android
 

Hi.

Glad you got GNU/Linux to run on Droid 3 via chroot. Would you please explain how you got that to work as I would like run Debian on android. Perhaps point to instruction on web if that is the case.

Thanks.

EDIT: Sorry if the question was off topic. But I am quite interested in this.

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

Any chance of configurable POI catagories?

Thanks.

Re: modRana on Android
 

I have done a good deal with python for android lately, and the biggest shortcoming is that there is no UI toolkit - you can't use GTK or anything. I ended up using a HTML page with Javascript to talk to the Python, not an ideal configuration.
That said - the drawing syntax for the HTML <canvas> element is nearly identical to that for a Cairo context, so it might not be too hard to port.

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

Still wondering how to import routes (like gpx) to Modrana. Have looked through settings and haven't found a possibility.

Re: modRana on Android
 

So interim findings: gpsd is not used on Android, there seems to be some Android port but not functional.

So far I've found ShareGPS, which basically should create a device in /dev which you should then be able to start gpsd with in chroot.

However, it seems ShareGPS is broken, as it doesn't report any GPS data on Droid 3...

I'll experiment further...

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

I've finally got some decent text to speech working with modRana using Google's translate TTS service, instead of using espeak.

For any one who is interested:

Change the voice parameter in the settings [sound>voice>string]
to:
/home/user/tts.sh "%qmessage%"

and then create an executable bash script, with the following:
Not the greatest method, but it works quite well.
I can't seem to find any API documentation to see if Google allow this, but I've read many iPhone/Android apps. take advantage of it, so maybe.

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

The only problem I see here is that it requires a constant Internet connection...

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

That's true, but it won't be a problem if you have a constant connection for map downloading.
Other than that, I can't really see any other way of having a decent TTS without an internet connection because I don't believe any TTS engine has been ported over.

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

What do you mean? Espeak sounds pretty good, at least as good as the TTS built into Android.

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

You won't have constant internet connection while you are on roaming or "in the fields", and that's when you need navigation the most.

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

It's not bad and is ok for the job, but espeak is a synthesiser, and obviously is not as good when compared to natural TTS engines like AT&T or neospeech. :)

Any way, the workaround is there for any one who wants a more natural voice, and is prepared to keep their internet connection open.

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

As a matter of fact, a very good TTS engine available on the market was ported to the n900 almost two years ago, delivered to Nokia but they never released it. My guess is that they were planning to add it to Maps, and then cancelled the whole thing.

A shame really....

Re: modRana on Android
 

Great success!!! I was able to get modRana to run on Android with gpsd navigation and all...

Thanks to skykooler, I eliminated the option of running modRana native on Android right away.

The only way to run is in debian chroot.

Now the process basically is:

- Install BlueNMEA from the Market in Android.
- Run BlueNMEA

It enables you to connect to the GPS data via tcp...

- In the debian chroot run:
gpsd will complain about not being able to connect to dbus, as it's not functional in chroot, however it'll run and it'll access the GPS data.

- Run modRana in the chroot, it navigates fine and everything.

Whoa!!!

Now, based on my findings of running modRana in chroot so far, I have the following two requests:

- An exit button is SORELY needed for modRana. This is not evident on the N900, where you exit via the x, however running StumpWM there is no window decoration, and no way to exit modRana. The only option is to kill it, and I'm afraid that exit is not clean, as it leaves python hanging etc. So please, an Exit button for a clean exit from modRana.

- Display orientation is NOT working, i.e. no matter if I select horizontal or landscape, the rotation is still the same. Automatic rotation doesn't work in the chroot, as X is accessed via TightVNC android VNC viewer, and obviously it doesn't give any signal. Can the rotation be fixed? And a rotation button, maybe optional would also be handy in the UI.

Sidenote, currently there is no espeak output in the chroot, as I can install espeak, however Android sound implementation obviously has nothing to do with alsa or pulse, and thus not sure how to get sound output in the chroot... Will investigate this further. If anyone has any hints on getting sound in the chroot, please mention those...

But basically, our modRana is WORKING in Android!

Re: modRana on Android
 

WOW, CONGRATULATIONS ! :D

Can I add this walk-through to the modRana project wiki ? :)

OK: http://modrana.org/data/modrana-0.29.6.tar.gz :)
I have added a new android_chroot device module, that adds a Quit button to the main menu if used.
To use it (and thus get the Quit button), just run the main executable like this:
Other than this, the android_chroot currently behaves the same as the default neo device module. It can be easily extended to cover the various android chroot quirks (like starting/stopping gpsd, etc.). If someone want to play with it, the module resides in the main modrana directory in modules/device_modules/mod_android_chroot.py :)

The current rotation in Fremantle is handled by the window manager. If you find how to tell the window manager to rotate the window or the whole desktop, I can add support for triggering it to the device module. Maybe through xrandr or a similar tool ?

The other possibility is to do the rotation entirely in modRana, which while doable, is not exactly easy. :)
It would need to:

• fake the viewport - just swaping a few numbers
• rotate all drawing - might not be that difficult due to using Cairo for the whole GUI
• rotate all click events

Is there some TTS API on android ? If it can be somehow triggered from chroot, this might be a solution.

Or producing a sound file with espeak (it can output wav files) and somehow playing it back outside of chroot.

Yay ! :D

PS.: Photos of modRana running on an Android handset would look really really nice on the modRana project frontpage! :)

Re: modRana on Android
 

Update, re the requests:

The exit seems to be clean when killing modRana's window directly, thus the Exit button is not such a dire need.

However the non-working rotation is a problem...

EDIT: woa, you're faster, just seen the above post, thanks for the Quit button, will test...

Re: modRana on Android
 

Of course, I'll write a detailed guide, with details on setting up the chroot in debian also etc. in a couple of weeks, as I'll be on vacation, but these details are basically all one needs to know to get it running.
Thanks, I'll test.
Yeah, xrandr will be the way to go, I'll post info on this...
I'll see what I can find on Android sound, I'd think there is a way to do it, let's see...
I remember I promised :O)

I'll do it, just have to also set up icewm or fluxbox in the chroot, so I'll get you some nice photos, as StumpWM doesn't give you any eye-candy... I just have to install these, since I don't use them at all, but I'll do it so I can take the screenshots. In a couple of days, it's gonna be done, when I head for vacation... :O)

directions_filter.csv
 

BTW, Martin please correct the following in the directions_filter.csv file:

should be

Пер.;переулок
пер.;переулок

not "prospekt" as you have there currently.

Also, further additions:

Пл.;Площадь
пл.;площадь
Пр.;Проспект
пр.;проспект
Просп.;Проспект
просп.;проспект
Pkwy ;Parkway
Pl ;Place
Plz ;Plaza
Rd ;Road
Sq ;Square
St.;Street
St ;Street
Tce ;Terrace
Trk ;Track
ул.;улица
1-й; первый
1-я; первая
2-й; второй
2-я; вторая
3-й; третий
3-я; третья
4-й; четвертый
4-я; четвертая
5-й; пятый
5-я; пятая
шо.; шоссе

Screenshots of running modRana in chroot on Android
 

As promised... :O)

I installed IceWM in chroot for this purpose, as it's the lightest on dependencies. Hope you like these...

http://sumoudou.org/pics/1a.png

http://sumoudou.org/pics/2a.png

http://sumoudou.org/pics/3a.png

Re: modRana on Android
 

OK, there is a problem with gpsd in chroot on Android.

Basically, doing what I outlined above, i.e. sharing the GPS data via BlueNMEA, modRana's position that it gets from gpsd is stuck on the original position.

Meaning, when you start modRana, it correctly shows you your location, however then as you drive, the GPS data doesn't get updated.

This could be a problem with:

- BlueNMEA not updating the GPS data via TCP
- with TCP transfer
- with gpsd in debian chroot having issues accessing the GPS data etc.

However, I confirmed, while driving that telneting to BlueNMEA 3542 port from inside the chroot worked, even while modRana's position from gpsd was stuck.

Sample output from the telnet:
Debugging gpsd, tcp, BlueNMEA etc. could be quite lengthy.

As we know that BlueNMEA correctly updates the GPS coordinates on its 4352 port at localhost, could we bypass gpsd, when running modRana in Android chroot, Martin?

I.e. access the telnet data directly, since then the problem with the GPS position being stuck would not have to be lengthily debugged, and modRana could be used...

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

I have a couple of questions:

1) Is it possible to predownload based on gps coordination? If I look correctly, it is either (1) around the route or (2) around the current postition on the map or (3) around the area on the map.
This way, it would be very difficult to download, say Vietnam (very big diference in latituted and small difference in longtitude).

2) How is downloading around view working? That should download what I see on the scree, right, or do I misunderstand something? But why does offer to download so few maps when I select a large area (around 100 000 km2) butnnly 1km? I thought that was supposed to be the margin to download around the are plus the are itself.

3) Does downloading from google even work? It does not seem to work for me.

Re: modRana on Android
 

OK, I ran more experiments.

It seems to me the bottleneck is modRana's interface to gpsd or gpsd itself.

Why?

I eliminated gpsd access to NMEA data via tcp, instead created a regular file with socat at /tmp/gps and then started gpsd reading from this file.

The GPS coordinates get updated, so I was able ascertain that the problem doesn't lay in BlueNMEA.

Anyhow, this way, I did get an initial fix, and pursuant updates of the GPS position on the map in modRana...

However, it seems that there is heavy processing going on, either on the modRana side, the GTK side, or, probably, the gpsd side, as I'd have the GPS point in modRana disappear for let's say 10 seconds at a time, then the position would update, the circle appear, then disappear again.

When it'd disappear, modRana would not react to screen taps, leading me to believe that there is some heavy processor load going on.

In fact a couple of times, modrana's window would go completely gray without displaying anything, and I had to kill modRana.

This seemed to disapper after I disabled automatic rotation in the direction of the car movement, leading me to believe the processing load is too heavy for VNC access to X on Android.

Then I got it to update the position at 10-20 second intervals, not very good.

This would improve dramatically, when the moving car would come to a stop at one point, whereby the point would appear right away, and modRana's interface would appear...

Either it's the GTK window redrawing in TightVNC which is causing the delays, or, what I'm hoping for, it's the gpsd interaction somehow...

Therefore, my proposal stands, to access the NMEA data directly, without the gpsd middleman, probably most comfortably via the regular files at /tmp/gps which I can create via socat...

That way we could determine if there would be a speedup in modRana's processing and whether it'd be usable on Android. Martin?

If not, then messing with TightVNC remains the option, lowering the number of colors of TightVNC display, this is an option, as it can interface at 256 colors, there would probably have to be some filter in modRana to only use 256 colors when started in a specific way, that could lead to processing speed increase...

Anyhow, I've already determined that android-vnc-viewer is compiled without xrandr support, so windows cannot be rotated in X chroot, so am having to look into an alternative VNC viewer anyway...

However, cutting out gpsd might still be worth it, though the main hog is probably X VNC access...

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

...who is using VNC anyway today? It's very resource demanding both for network I/O as well as memory I/O, caused by it's implementation of uncompressed full framebuffer transmits. I know that under Android it seems the only way to access chroots and the like, caused by the crippled architecture / integration of Android which doesn't allow simple, efficient X redirects. That's one of the points why quite some people avoid Android if you don't rely on games'n'stuff.

Re: directions_filter.csv
 

Thanks ! It's already committed to the SVN version an will be released in the next update. :)

Nice ! :) Can I include the screenshots on the project website and Maemo wiki article (once written :) ). ?

Can you check if the position is updated if you restart modRana ?

Also, try to enable "Show gpsd debug output" in Options->Debug->GPS, modRana will start printing the information it gets from gpsd to stdout.

I have found a few other things to check in the gpsd troubleshooting guide:

• stopping gpsd & running it manually with debug output:
  
  Code:

  ---

  gpsd -N -D3 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

  ---

• using cgps or xgps utilities to check the output from gpsd (they are in the package gpsd-clients, at least on Ubuntu)

This certainly also possible - modRana already has a worker thread (in the location module that resides in modules/mod_location.py that reads position data from GPSD. The worker thread could be modified to connect to BlueNMEAs socket and parsing the NMEA sentences it provides. There is just a single stable source (BlueNMEA) without the usual quirks of standard GPS devices, the parsing should not be that difficult, at least for basic location data (latitude, longitude, elevation, speed, direction(?)).

Good point !
I see two possible solutions for this uscase:

• entering two lat:lon coordinate sets, representing the upper left and lower right corners of the area to download
• interactively placing a rectangle on the map over the area to download

Imagine a crosshair in the middle of the screen - thats where the download is centered when using Download around view.

That's because the maps consist of square tiles organized in zoom-levels. On zoom level 0, one tile covers the whole world, on zl 1 4 tiles cover the world, on zl 2 its 16, ... , zl 17 has 17.179.869.184 tiles, etc. :)
So the number of tiles modRana downloads mainly depends on the zoom level range selected.

Google does not really like external use of their tiles and temporarily stops serving them if it detects excessive usage from an IP address.

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

I agree with you man, but I switched to Droid 3, as I'm a heavy Emacs user, and Emacs is faster on it in the chroot, much much faster, than on the N900... And it has a MUCH better keyboard than the N900.

So not only those who rely on games :O)

But yeah, if I could get my hands on an N950, I'd probably be much happier with it, but it can't be had.

So I'm stuck with Android, and that's how I got to experimenting with modRana in it... And VNC is the only way unfortunately...