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

I've checked it myself and you were right - it really is broken. I've already found a fix, which will be part of the next update. :)

There is actually a Perl script by Beermad that does just this. :) I would like to also add support for this with modRana itself, but I can't really say when I'll get to it.

You mean in the QML GUI ? (as there are basically no animations in the classic GTK GUI) Yeah, I'm considering adding it - I've already done some testing - menu switching is really fast, but a bit confusing as the animations add considerable feedback. Still, at least on the N900 they are a bit laggy, so turning them off really should be an options.

I haven't done much work on the QML GUI as I've concentrated mainly on the offline routing (I'm currently working on more sane tbt directions & an own modRana repository with up-to-date global Monav routing data). I'll hope I'll get back to it soon. :) BTW, as always - patches & pull requests are welcome ! :)

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

Oh and by the way:
modRana won the first place in the Maemo.org coding competiton 2012 !!
(in the Updates & Development on Existing Apps category)

Thanks a lot to everyone who supported modRana with their vote !! :D

Also thanks to all those, who wanted to vote, but regrettably couldn't - still much appreciated ! :) Don't forget to link your Maemo accounts before the next years competition starts. ;)

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

Congratulations on winning the competition! I joined the forum too late to vote, but I absolutely agree the app is a winner!

I have a couple of questions if I may. Sorry if they have already been answered; I tried to prowl through all the 1162 posts but things may have slipped my attention. Now if there was a search functionality per thread, that would be something...

Anyway. My first question, I was using modRana on the PC to download a big bunch of maps. This works fine and much faster than on my N900, but there is a small problem. The PC does not have a GPS and the program always defaults to starting in Brno. To get the UK maps, I had to zoom out to level 2, scroll, zoom in. Is there a better way? To fake the GPS coordinates, for example? I looked at all the config files in ~/.modrana but they did nor provide the answer.

Err, I'm sure I had more on my mind when I started this post but it took me so long to type it that I had forgotten the rest. I will come back when (if?) I remember :)

[EDIT}I have found thread search at the top of the page, doh! Still can't find the answer though...[/EDIT]

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

Thanks ! :)

Its possible, but rather convoluted. :)

First create a POI on the coordinates you want to set as curren GPS position. Then in the POI detail menu, click on tools and then on set as position. And thats it. :) This is needlessly complicated and should be much simpler.

Alternatively, you can also use the --focus-on-coordinates CLI option.

BTW, I've added both to the very brief and totally incomplete modRana manual. :)

Looking forward to your questions ! :)

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

Generating your own Monav routing data
I've created a simple script that makes generating modRana compatible Monav routing data quite easy. See the corresponding wiki article for more details. :)

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

Where do I find monav-server?

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

Congrats on winning the competition!

One thing I think would be handy, and probably pretty easy to add, would be a button on the Route page that would swap the start and destination fields, to allow quick re-routing when you are returning from a destination.

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

Monav-server is bundled in the modRana package and used automatically, no need to install it manually. The monav-server binary itself is located in the /opt/modrana/modules/mod_route/monav_armv7 directory.

BTW, it would be probably good to create a proper monav-server package, but doing it like this was much faster. :)

BTW2: monav-server != monav-daemon

While they do roughly the same thing, the monav-daemon only has a C++ interface, while monav-server sends protocol buffers over a TCP socket.

Thanks ! :)

Good point - there is even some empty space for exactly one button. :)

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

I've release a small modRana update - V0.35.13

It fixes the issue with walking directions not being provided in the "Foot" mode & adds a swap button to the Address2Address routing screen. :)

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

Thannnnks for the great app buddy. I am tryimg to use the gtk ui on n9, and *** you are aware, it has issues with text input. the VKB does not come up. But tthe more interesting problem I notiiiced is that, in gtk mode it is not getting gps position.

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

I think I saw a workaround somewhere in the GTK@Harmattan thread.

Hmm, I haven't tested it but from the code it looks like it should work. I'll check it out on device to see what might be causing it.

BTW, quite a shame that the current Harmattan repositories lack proper dependency handling - as the GTK UI is perfectly usable on Harmattan (and fast! :) ) and only issue blocking it is that it needs GTK libraries, that are not available from the default repositories.

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

The more I play with this app the more I love it. The UI is a bit different but intuitive and easy to get used to. And... I have just discovered monav offline navigation and now I am in the nirvana! :)

I have a few questions and suggestions if you don't mind.

1. I could not get "download tiles along route" to work. All I get is the two preloaded examples. Am I missing a step there? I suspect a user error not a software bug.

2. The voice guidance is too quiet in a car, but I doubt modRana can do anything about that.

3. For navigation in imperial units, yards are more customary (and intuitive) than feet. "Turn left after 100 yards" is more common than "turn left after 300 feet". OTOH, yards are never used for vertical distances, only feet. Strage system, I know :)

4. I think there is a missing slash somewhere in the PC version. I used it to batch download a lot of tiles and it stored them in ~/.modrana/mapsOpenStreetMap, not ~/.maps/OpenStreetMap. I may look through the scripts to see if I can find it, though I am far from a Python expert.

5. Is there an option and if not, how difficult would it be to add, to restrict which zoom levels to use? Not just min and max, but for example only even layers, to save space.

6. It would be nice if the app had its own help. Somewhere where the about info is. Not essential, only nice.

7. If the app used vector graphic and pre-recorded voices, then I believe it would be ready for commercial release! :)

BTW I tried raising a ticket about #3 but the wiki did not like me. Again, I suspect the problem between my keyboard and my chair.

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

Is there any possibility to share Monav offline navigation data, between ModRana and other programs, like Marble? I mean, is path for monav packs configurable, or hard-coded (in the latter case, it would be only possible to achieve desired effect via symlinks, aka not in vfat MyDocs)?

/Estel

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

Thanks very much for adding this!

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

I'm still trying to use a map program offline. But even though I have all the tiles I want downloaded to /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap I, it simply won't display anything unless it can access a connection.

When I go to Menu > options > map > map layers, I see it's set to use "OSM Mapnik." That requires access to OSM servers, so that's the problem, I guess. But I can't find any way to tell it to just use the local tiles.

What am I doing wrong? :confused:

(I do have the latest update, version .35-and-so-on. I'm using N900.)

Edited to add: I think I'm getting closer: I should probably modify map_config.conf? But if so, how? This is the mapnik entry and possible changes:

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

Quick reply...
Theoretically, you don't need to modify anything to make it use local tiles. Just make sure that sqlite option in Modrana is turned off, I guess, so that it would not look for a database file? And there is no need to change 'url="http://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/"' in the map_config.conf; thanks to 'folder_prefix=OpenStreetMap I', it already knows where to take the tiles from. Also, could you go into the folder /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap\ I/ and check the folder structure?
Best wishes.

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

I'm trying it right now on my pc with this command: python modrana.py -u GTK -d pc (On both pc and n900, it insists on trying to download.)

With wifi turned off, the terminal shows at least a couple of things that look problematic, but I don't know enough to have a clue:
It also complains quite a bit about "icons: not found" but they seem to show up just fine, so that's probably nothing.

The display itself, both on pc and when I run it on n900, has a repeated message about "tile failed to download, network error ... check connection, use different map layer, ...". I went back to using OSM Mapnik, since that's supposed to work.

On the n900, the "/home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap I/" directory seems to have lost most of the tiles I carefully downloaded. But it does have the ones for where I live, so it could at least be showing those. I have store to sqlite turned off. Also turned off on the PC. On the PC, the "/home/quixote/.modrana/maps/OpenStreetMap I/" directory has got the zillion downloaded tiles.

But all it wants to do is download more... :(

Thanks for your help! :)

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

Be sure to have options->Map->Tile storage->Store download tiles=on.
But the safe way is always to delete (move away) ~user/.modrana and ~user/MyDocs/.maps as it works by default.

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

This is exactly why I rather paid for better Modrana as compared to the commercial offerings it features detailed maps and it can also read the names of streets.

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

jankratochvil: I have store download tiles=on. I'm not sure I understand the rest of your answer. If there is no default dir (eg I rename it) then are you saying modrana will use a non-default local directory that I specify?

How do I specify it, in that case? I don't remember seeing an option to do that. Or just edit one of the .conf files?

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

Modrana will just use its standard paths where will be no files so Modrana will reinitialize from scratch, like on a newly bought N900.

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

Far as I can see in the MoNav client there is an option to choose a Data Directory and Load map data eg. Memory Card/MoNav_maps/Norway

Please implement this.

Why on the earth isnt ModRana in Extras-Testing?

Edit:
http://wiki.maemo.org/ModRana_offline_routing_guide

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

jankratochvil: I'm not having any trouble running modrana. I want it to use downloaded tiles instead of always refusing to show a map unless it has a connection. (I do field work, and there's often no signal, but it would still be nice to have a map on my n900.) So I don't really need to re-initialize, do I?

What I want to do is see maps when there's no connection. (p118 has details on the error messages I get.)

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

I have always used the GUI to start the app, both on the N900 and on the PC. So I don't know what those command-line arguments mean. Neither am I very versed in Python. So what I say may be a complete bull****. But the code in your post #1177 looks to me like getting the GPS coordinates failed because GPSD, whatever that is (a GPS deamon?) isn't connected. As a wild guess, couldn't your problem be caused by having Network positioning enabled in global Location settings?

Let me run a quick test... exit modRana; go to System->Settings->Location; enable Network positioning; switch to offline mode; start modRana... Hmm, inconclusive. I got "Failed to download" tiles for a second, but very quickly replaced with stored tiles. I also got a GPS fix around the same time, quite likely because I haven't moved. Perhaps worth trying driving a few km before the last step.

When you are connected, do you get a map right away or do you get green tiles with "Downloading..." printed across them for a while?

EDIT:
Please disregard my rant above. MartinK posted the correct answer in post #1190. I would delete this post if there was such an option.

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

Vector maps can be just as detailed with the added advantage of being scalable. You could have a single file covering a whole country or even a continent rather than millions of tiles, many of them missing. Street names may be more useful (and intelligible!) in Czech Republic (I know, I come from Slovakia originally :)), but here in the UK the situation is a bit different. Street names are often obscured and rarely shown other than at the beginning and the end. If you join the street in the middle, you have no idea what the name is. "Turn left" is much more useful than "turn to Oxford Road", even if it sounded like "Oxford Road" and not "Khrookhfd Road".

Please don't get me wrong, I love the product and yes, I have put my money where my mouth is, even though only a small amount for now. It far exceeds any other offering currently available for this platform. But it has a lot of potential it has not quite realized yet.

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

I found a new feature. When I scroll the map to a missing tile in offline mode, the tile will not be downloaded even if I connect to the internet unless I close and re-open the program.

Question: where are navigation messages stored? I mean things like "in xx miles turn to..."
I grepped through the /opt/modrana tree but could not find them...

Question 2: how can I take this offline? There must be a better place than this forum. I tried the ticket wiki but it thought I was a spam.

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

Quick reply...
I don't remember very well, but it seems to me that these messages are stored inside the python file (maybe, "mod_route.py") which creates the route. This 'hard-coding' is one of the reasons they are always in English, and not any other language. I may be mistaken, of course.
Best wishes.

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

modRana V0.36.2 has been released ! :)

Changelog:

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

Well, this was caused by a wrong naming choice - "route" in this context meant "along one of the saved GPX tracklogs". But I've done a slight overhaul in 0.36, so now "route" really means the currently active route and "around track" now has the old functionality. :)

Well, it looks like it can. :) I've checked out eSpeaks command line options - it looks like the volume/amplitude can be set using the -a parameter. I've incorporated this functionality in 0.36 and added an option for setting volume to Options->Sound->Voice. The only downside is, that at very high volume, the output becomes a bit distorted.

OK, I've switched to yards by default for small imperial units & added a yard/feet switch to Options->View->Units. :)

Yeah, you were right ! :) There was one old manual concatenation (not using the proper os.path.join()) in the batch download module (mod_mapData). Should be fixed in 0.36. :)

That shouldn't be that difficult to implement, the only issue is, that different map layers have different zoomlevel ranges. So you would either need a global setting with toggle for say 1-21 or/plus a per layer setting for toggling the individual zoomlevels on/off. "Even/Odd zoomlevels only" would work universally though. :)

Well, yeah - I think I should at least include a link for the website & this thread for start. :)

Regarding in-application help, there are basically two issue

Rendering long pieces of text in a meaningful way. The classic GTK GUI is custom made in a fullscreen Cairo Widget and doesn't use any other GTK widgets other than dialogs at the moment. So the help text would either need to be paginated or a GTK widget would need to be use somehow (replacing the current widget temporarily or running in a dialog ?).

And there is not that much of "help" content even on the project website to begin with. Most of the modRana knowledge is probably located in this very thread. :) This is a standard issue for OSS projects - if you are writing manuals, you are not adding features & fixing bugs. :)

Well, the Marble project recently gathered navigation voice samples in multiple languages. As they are licensed CC-By-SA 3.0, it should not be problem to use them in modRana in the future. :)

Regarding vector map rendering, the most promising project from modRanas point of view is called Kothic. It is a realtime map renderer written in Python. It looks really interesting, but I haven't yet got to installing it and checking out how well it works. The output looks very nice though. :)

There are of course also other renderers such as the one inside Navit or Monav - but to my knowledge, non of those has any interface, that would make it usable from third-party applications.

And there is also still the old renderer from Rana in /opt/modrana/modules/pyrender/. This is how it's output looked like. I've tried to get it to work after I've forked Rana in early 2010 but have just disabled it in the end.

I've had serious automated spam issues on the modRana TRAC instance, so this is why the (maybe a bit too strong) checks are in place. I think that if you register an account and/or fill in the chaptcha, it should let you in. :) Or you can just use the modRana issue tracker on Github - I check out both.

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

The Monav data are stored in /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/monav_data/ for exactly this reason. :) It even keeps the master_folder/subfolder Monav data package structure, so it should also be theoretically directly usable by Monav (once you select the appropriate directory).

Marble stores its Monav routing data in /home/user/MyDocs/.local/share/marble/maps/earth/monav/[mode/][continent/][country/]. As it uses a custom profile folder prefix, I don't thing they plan to share the data.

On the N900, you should run it with:
Or else you won't get location and other platform specific tweaks. :)
That's just an unrelated & harmless error message caused by the GPS daemon (GPSD) not running. It should not show up anymore since 0.36.2.

Also harmless. There is a button somewhere in modRana, that has an empty string for icon name - have not yet been able to find it. :)

As 0.36 fixes batch download related bug, that cased the tiles to be saved to a wrong path, please update and check if it fixes your issue.

Also, to disable automatic tile download (indicated by those Downloading... map tiles shown when you enter a new map area) go to Options->Network->Network usage and set Network to Don't download map tiles. Like this modRana will not download any map tiles, unless explicitly through the batch download menu.

Yep, you can do more than just render the map when you have the underlying vector data - like checking on which street you are or pinning the position indicator to the current road in the turn-by-turn mode.

Even though it doesn't support vector map rendering just yet, modRana already has a broad range of donation options. :)

https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/..._donate_LG.gif

http://api.flattr.com/button/flattr-badge-large.png

bitcoin:1DrV3zv6d9xxAjTSM1P1EAmPyYsvvfUwyL

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

While not that straightforward like in Monav, it can already be done through the ~/.modrana/user_config.conf file. Just uncomment the map_config variable and set it to your new map folder path, for example:
then you can add your map folders to Memory Card/maps/monav_data/, with the resulting path looking like this:
Rapid development cycle & many people already having Extras-Devel enabled. But yes, good point, I really should push it there already.

The only other issue might be with some Qt dependencies for the QML GUI that I'm not sure are available in Testing & plain Extras. But I'd guess we will see once I push the promotion button. :)

ModRana works with the concept of device & GUI modules. The device module provide any device/platform specific tweaks (like map storage paths, location access, custom notification handling, etc.) and the contains all the GUI specific bits. Like this modRana can adapt for a platform just loading the appropriate device and GUI modules on startup.

There are multiple device modules (for the N900, N9, Neo FreeRunner, Smart Q7, Android chroot, PC, etc.) and two GUI modules (the classic GTK GUI and the QML one).

The -d option specifies the current device/platform and -u selects the GUI module. But since at least 0.35 modrana should correctly detect the current environment (at least on the N900, N9 and x86/amd_64 based PCs) and select the appropriate modules automagically.

There is also the added benefit of proper rotation support. If you use map rotation with pre-rendered maps, you will quite often get upside down street names. :)

There are also other benefits - you can generate different map themes form the same data - a night theme, high contrast theme, etc.

I've already sent "Thank you!" postcard. :)

The "in XX" part (and also the "you should be near the destination" message) are generated by modRana. The rest comes directly from Google and only goes through the substitution rules specified by directions_filter.csv to "unroll" the most common abbreviations.

IIRC:
mod_onlineServices - performs the online route lookup
mod_route - sends the request to onlineServices and handles the result
mod_voice - adds the "in XX" prefix
mod_turnByTurn - handles the turn-by-turn navigation logic & overlay

As Monav returns just the raw route, modRana would need to get a proper turn announcement generator (and turn detector) in the near future.

There are also already translations for the current modRana generated voice command, which are unfortunately not yet integrated in modRana itself.

For continuity purposes - answered in the previous post. :)

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

Update works beautifully, and a thousand thanks for all the information!

The path wasn't the problem because I figured that was typo and had fixed it manually. But what was causing that constant downloading was this option that you flagged:I never even looked there. That is what solved the problem.

Thanks again for all your hard work on this!

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

For anyone out there who, like me, has been looking for a good open source map program that also works offline, here's my experiences.

modrana: far and away the best user interface, and now that I can use offline maps, the best thing out there for me.

navit: a very good effort, and if some kind soul comes up with a navit.xml (their config file) that has sensible defaults, it'll be a real runner-up. My problem with it right now is that text sizes have to be set for every zoom level, there's no easy way to guess what zoom level I'm on, so it's a matter of guesswork and trial and error to try to find sensible values. So far, I haven't managed.

monav: an excellent front-end for OpenStreetMaps, very fast. User interface not quite to modrana standards, but okay. Offline maps generated using a vector program which shows real promise, but ... but, but, but, right now it only draws very few of the features so it's functionally useless offline.

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

Yes, I had discovered that too when I was playing around. Setting the espeak parameters manually helped. Of course, having the option in the GUI is much better, thanks for that. The only thing, the espeak help says that the maximul volume is 200; I am not sure how valid settings beyond that are, I have not tested it yet :)

Unfortunately, it seems that something has broken as a side effect of this change. Leaving the sound settings at "automatic" works fine, but switching to "manual" makes two lots of "edit espeak options" and "reset to defaults" appear and, more importantly, it makes the sound disappear. I can of course leave it at automatic but I was fiddling with the options to try to make it mole legible.

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

I found something related to the volume setting on the speechd mailing list. It concludes that values up to 400 should be safe. But from my experience it seems to be very device dependent - I can use much higher values on my Laptop than on the N900 and still get acceptable output.

Thats quite possible, I'll check it out. :)

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

That's the thing! The blooming TRAC says I must be spam because I did not fill the captcha, but there was no captcha to fill! Neither was there any way of creating an account that I could find. A browser problem? I've tried Firefox on Debian and IE on Windows 7.

Completely unrelated: is there (going to be?) a way of importing POIs from a track? It might be useful in two ways. The obvious one, you walk or drive past something that you later decide to store as a POI. The more advanced, and perhaps not as useful to everyone, there is a tool out there to convert the TomTom POI database to GPX. It would be cool to import that to modRana :) It does not look too advanced, just a simple XML to SQLite conversion, so I guess I can do it myself if I have to :)

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

modRana 0.36.3 has been released
OK, I'll check it out. There were some changes in the hosting setup, so it might got broken in the process.

You mean you would create a very short track and the import it to the POI database ?
As even very short tracklogs can have tens of points & normal ones have hundreds or thousands, you would probably just want to import the first or last point ?

There are numerous point types in in GPX (trackpoints, waypoints, routepoints,...) - which ones does it use to represent the POI ?

BTW, I was already thinking about adding support for importing POI from files with a CLI parameter. Initially just from simple CSV files, but adding support for GPX files that contain POI should not be that difficult.

It should be also already possible to export the POI database to a CSV file (options->POI->POI storage->Export POI database to CSV), but it seems to be failing for some reason at the moment. :)

EDIT:
Should be fixed in 0.36.4. :)

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

modRana 0.36.6
Turn directions for Monav offline routing results now have proper instructions - eq. turn [slightly/sharply] left/right + U-turns + continue to.

The directions are English-only for the moment, but it should be easy to add support for other languages in the future. I would also like to have a Transifex project for the turn instructions(like Mieru already has), so that everyone can help with the translation easily from the browser. :)

Roundabouts are not yet handled correctly, but as the Monav client seems to have a working algorithm for roundabout detection, it shouldn't be hard to add.

modRana in Extras-testing
I have promoted modRana 0.36.6 to Extras-testing. Please test & vote so that it can reach the Extras repository soon. :)

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

While I'm mostly off-line routing "fan" (I don't know, maybe it's this apocalyptic type, that like to have things working without "external" components access, no matter what), I've found that, lately, I'm using ModRana as much as (if not more than) Marble, for my everyday navigation program.

Considering size of team behind Marble, and fact that ModRana is written entirely by you, it's really impressive, at least to me. Hats off, kudos, and really big "thank you" for this awesome piece of software, that is developed and updated in unbelievable pace.

/Estel

// Edit

not to mention, that ModRana affect development of others navigational programs - for example, it's source of my request (to upstream Marble) for streamlining path for Monav off-line routing packs. Impressive, really impressive.

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

Also Saera is using the modRana command line interface (for amenity search, determining the current coordinates, etc.) :)

Regarding other upstreamable there is the space-efficient sqlite tile storage and plaintext alarm lists.

IIRC the CloudGPS developer wants to add support for it. And the alarm lists are not yet even implemented in modRana - but that still doesn't prevent others from supporting the concept in their apps. :)