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

I tried to submit this with the tracker at www.modrana.org, but it didn't work.

The following is still bothering the current Modrana: the centering setting of the map doesn't stay after reboot of the program. If it's set to off in all modes, it will be on when Modrana starts again.

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

About the conversion tile files -> sqlite database:

FYI I have run this script natively on N900 and it looked as completed right. But now I have found I miss very randomly here and there about 10% of the tiles.

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

Yeah, the centering on startup is pretty much hardcoded right now. I'll look at it for the next update (so that if it is set to OFF, it won't center at startup and just show the last seen map area).

Do you think this is N900 specific issue (it does work fine on PC ?)?


Oh, any by the way:

Monav routing data packs with whole world coverage (per-country & up-to-date):
http://data.modrana.org/monav/

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

It was FYI, I have no idea and I find it a bit difficult to debug, redownloading some missing pieces of maps is fortunately not such a burden.

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

How do I find out if anything is missing? Just browsing the map in modRana? Jankratochvil's post seems to suggest that.

Just FYI, I have now completed the conversion of my 152,127 tiles. I used my ancient Pentium 4 laptop from 2004. I did not copy the tiles, just mounted the N900 and did the conversion there directly. It took about an hour, which seems consistent with beermad's post (200,000 tiles in ~75 minutes). Except that he used a much more powerful machine, suggesting that the CPU power is not the determining factor.

The resulting sqlite files take 444 MB, a bit more than the 407 MB my tiles used to take, but much less than 1.28 GB my tiles used to occupy on the disk, even with the smallest cluster size I managed to get (8 KB). In other words, a huge improvement.

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

Yes, with "Network: Don't Download Map Tiles" and previously fully downloaded regions I can see the missing tiles.

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

I've checked the script and was surprised how readable & well documented it is. :) All seems to be fine & it even correctly handles multiple store databases (needed due to the limited single-file-size on FAT32).

A couple of possibilities what might be causing the missing tiles:

• old tiles - modRana previously didn't check downloaded tiles, so sometimes some tiles might actually have been error pages - but if the tiles were showing fine in offline mode and now aren't, this can't be it
• bug in modRana - modRana fails to load the tiles from the database for some reason
• bug in the import script - I'm not that well versed in perl, so maybe there is still some edge-case that is intermittently triggered

Anyway, I'm currently considering finally adding the tile import functionality to modRana - probably first through the command line interface, followed by support in the GUIs.
The tile storage logic is all there, it just needs to know from where to take the tiles and to which database they should be added.

About the modRana data repository
(http://data.modrana.org/monav/)

First, I would like to thank the Natural Language Processing Centre of the Masaryk University for providing the hosting & computational resources needed to generate the data in the first place. Thanks a lot ! :)

Coverage
The whole world should be covered, 2-3x times. :) There are data packs for individual countries, continents and for some countries (Germany, France, Canada,...) also for local regions. There are separate car, bike & pedestrian data packs.

BTW, the car routing data size for Europe is about 3 GB, so it should fit on the MyDocs FAT32 partition without issues. :)

Installing data for modRana
Installation is the same as with previous data packs - they are just in tar.gz, not in zip. The car/bike/pedestrian pack include the shared data structur, just unpack them to the usual /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/monav_data/ directory.

Example (on the N900):

Statistics
Total repository size: 91 GB
Pack count: about 265
Source data downloads: 37.18GB source OSM data in PBF format
Total run length: about 5 hours on a machine with 48 CPU cores (including all stages - download, processing & packaging)

Software
The modRana data repository software, used to generate the repository, is hosted on Github:
https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana-data-repository
If you want to have your own repository, just run repository.py and the repository will be created inside the results directory.

I plan to write a proper post about how the repository software works & I'm also still working on it, mainly on more configuration options & providing better feedback while running a repository update.

Planed features

• repository manifest - so that the repository can be used for downloading data directly from modRana
• *.zsync files for incremental data updates
• regular repository updates - about every 3 days
• maybe also MD5SUMS ?

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

Quick reply...
Small question, about updating ModRana: why does dpkg complain about not being able to delete non-empty directory "/opt/modrana/modules/googlemaps"?
Best wishes. Thank you.

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

A quick comment. Yesterday I put modRana to a bit of a test. It was the first time I used it on a motorway. Driving at just about 70 mph (110 km/h), I noticed that it was it was coping well, rotating the maps as it should, but the screen refresh was a bit jerky and there was also a bit of a lag in showing my current position. For example, it showed me crossing under a bridge when I was already a good 50 m behind. Is it related to my recent conversion from tiles to sqlite? I have never tried modRana at anything beyond 30 mph (48 km/h) before so I wouldn't know...

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

MartinK: would it be possible to include aeronautical charts (as for example http://www.chartbundle.com/charts/) as a map layers option?

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

IIRC, such errors are caused when an application directory contains files that were not there when the application was installed from a package. This might be somehow caused by the post-install script, that generates the *.pyc bytecode files for faster startup (as modRana can't write to /opt/modrana when started under the user account, it can't create them by itself and would need to parse all the *.py files on every startup).

Generally, it should be harmless.

As modRana stores all important data in ~/.modrana, which is not deleted if you just uninstall the package without purging it, this should fix the warnings:

BTW, congratulations for winning the special prize in the coding competition ! :)

I did quite a few optimizations in this regard but high-speed usage is still quite demanding, as modRana has to:

• check what tiles are visible
• check what are in the memory cache
• load those that aren't (from storage or from network)
  • due to the high speed, generally less tiles will be already in cache and more will have to be loaded
• display the result

In the 1 second time window specified by the default screen refresh rate.
Also, if position shift & map rotation are enabled, it has to generally do more work as:

• it has to figure out which tiles are covered by the rotated viewport
• generally, more tiles are visible than without rotation, that need to be loaded & rendered
• rotate and clip the result

All drawing is done with Cairo, which IIRC is not hardware accelerated on Fremantle.

The updates should be triggered by position update (which should occur every second) - the more demanding the current "scene" is, the more lag from position update to screen redraw you get.

What can be dome about it:

• further optimizations
  • profiling the current implementation to see where are the bottlenecks (like time spend the in the tile storage functions for sqlite vs for files)
  • pre-loading tiles in direction of travel to memory
  • drawing larger map are than what is currently visible and shifting it until it is inside the viewport
• lazy screen redraw
  • move just the position indicator and update the map only once it gets near the screen edge
  • this unfortunately prevent proper map rotation & position shifting support + make the map "jump" from time to time
• QML - screen rotation should be "free" in QML, which should alleviate much of the issues with the current implementation in Cairo
  • on the other hand drawing the route polylline in QML is more difficult than in Cairo due the the item/texture implementation in QML that makes rotation & co so fast :)

BTW, you can also use:
options->Debug->Redrawing->Print redraw time to terminal to see how long the last screen redraw took. If it reports >1000 ms or if the value shows less than every second, tile loading & screen redraw is causing the lags. If not, the cause is somewhere else (N900 GPS software/hardware lag ?).

To check tile loading:
options->Debug->Tiles->tile loading status to terminal - this will print debugging info to the terminal for every tile that is loaded, including how long it took & what storage method was used.

The log might get quite verbose as a result & I'd guess you would probably not want to check it while drawing at such quite a high speed, sou you might wan't to enable: options->Debug->Loggin->Log modRana stdout to file
This should dump all the terminal output to /home/user/MyDocs/modrana_debug_logs/ :)

Well, that was a bit exhaustive. :D

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

Yep, the tile & coordinate format looks compatible. But as there seems to be quite a bunch of layers available, I'll have to hack together some sort of layer grouping so that it doesn't swamp the layer-chooser. :)

BTW, if you find any other interesting map layers, I don't mind to add them to the built-in layer config. :)


Also, it looks like modRana successfully cleared all the Maemo steps (thanks to all testers !) and is now available from Extras & Maemo Downloads ! :)

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

MartinK,

I was pleasantly suprised by the option to use monav offine datafiles, as I usually don't use an internet connection when I am from home.

But I was not able to make it work till now. I downloaded the data (local car data) and extracted it in the map. And I can select that data somewhere in modRana. Nevertheless, the map keeps saying "Loading..." on a green background. Changing some other settings in modRana did not help.

Any idea what I am missing to fix this?

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

Unfortunately, modRana currently uses Monav only for offline routing.

The monav-preprocessor can create data for vector Map rendering & the Monav client can use them. But there is no interface for third-party applications, such as modRana, to use this functionality.

Possible solutions:

• extending the Monav interface to output rendered map images (as map tiles ?)
  • would probably need to be done by the creators of Monav or at least someone with more C++ knowledge than I have :)
  • the interface is based on Google's Protocol Buffer format, so returning binary image data would not be an issue
• just using the Monav (or some other vector data) format for a different modRana compatible renderer, such as Kothic

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

why qml version is not working ? Other version is ok

Latest thumb version, kp v52

thanks

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

This is the latest version of file mod_route.py, for ModRana version 0.36.6 git:c59ca30.
A line should also be added into mod_menu.py,as line 1100, to make the GUI icon for handmade route visible:
It's not a final, polished version, I suspect; first, even though overall length of route is likely correct, the lengths of steps are most likely completely wrong; second, there should be a way, while creating a route, to edit, or even delete, middle points, in case one of them is set incorrectly.
Best wishes to all of you.
__________________
Per aspera ad astra...

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

I've just tested the current package on CSSU stable (nonthumb) KP 51 and it seems to work fine. Can you run:
and post the output ? :)

Thanks ! I've merged it locally and it looks fine. :) I like how the routing buttons are hidden once the "routing" so that the don't block the map. I think I'll probably do something like this globally:

• once a route is found, show only a "current route" button
• when clicking current route, show two buttons: "info" & "edit"
• "info" shows the route info screen
• "edit" shows the routing buttons

What do you think ? :)

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

Thank you. I like the idea, of minimalist interface and easy access to editing a route. Programming the editing of a route will not be easy, I expect - I don't know for sure.
And, several lines from mod_route.py, connected to creating the route from points, should be moved to way.py as a function (akin to fromMonav... and fromGoogle...) so that mod_route.py would not have to import geo. And while length of the whole route is calculated correctly, distance between two steps is right now calculated incorrectly (taken from options, like, announcing distance). Just listing the inconsistencies I remember in my own code.
Best wishes.
__________________
Per aspera ad astra...

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

I looked up ModRana on github, and this merge was not here. Oh, well... The distance between two steps, and therefore distance-from-start, are now calculated correctly. This latest version of mod_route.py is attached.
__________________
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Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I'm doing the routing menu modification at once with merging your changes - I've changed quite a lot in the end, so I'll push it once it works again. :)

I normally try to push as often as possible, so this is something of an exception. :)

Thanks, I'll add it in. :)

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

modRana development update: :)

• Wikiwides handmade routing has been merged
• online routing routing now supports waypoint
• modRana now uses a newer Directions API
  • looks like they added public tracport routing in June, so that could be also used in modRan in the future
  • I've also found than bahn.de (the backend used by Fahrplan) seems to do pan-European railway "routing" quite nicely, including nearest station search
• new point2point routing UI that clutters the screen less than the old one
• icon update for search presets
• there was a modrana.org outage on Sunday & Monday caused by a RAID crash, but everything should be now back to normal. :)

Also got modRana running on an ExoPC with Fedora & gnome Shell while on LinuxAlt:
http://www.modrana.org/images/modrana_exopc.jpg
Didn't have to change a single line or install any additional packages, just downloaded the master tarball from Github & started modrana.py.

ModRana detected the Atom powered ExoPC as a desktop computer and automatically used the correct device and GUI modules. :)

Looks like I'll really have to do those packages for Fedora after all. :D

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

hello you all,

I would like to ask for some help: when I launch ModRana, it doesn't load the map on the device. when I launch it from terminal, it says: "process 2497: arguments to dbus_connection_get_data() were incorrect, assertion "connection != NULL" failed in file dbus-connection.c line 5757.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.
process 2497: arguments to dbus_connection_set_data() were incorrect, assertion "connection != NULL" failed in file dbus-connection.c line 5721.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library."

what sholud I do to make it work...? I use kernel version 2.6.28.10-power50. thanks in advance,

jm

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

Quick reply...
I usually get this message when attempting to run ModRana as root. When you start ModRana in X-Terminal, it should be done as non-root.
Best wishes.
__________________
Per aspera ad astra...

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

thanks, it works - it starts, but still doesn't load the map (I set it up as written): "tile download failed due to network error". one more information (maybe I sholud have told this earlier): I didn't installed it wia internet connection, I installed only the dependencies' .deb file... so during installation it said: libqtm12 conflicts libqtm12contacts, etc., does not install.

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

Any progress on this ? From the error message, it looks like a network error. Do you have Internet connectivity on your N900 ? ModRana currently needs Internet to download map tiles. Of course you can download the tiles beforehand and then remain offline. :)

The libqtm* are needed by the QML interface and should not be an issue if you run the classic GTK interface.

modRana 0.37.2 has been released !
HOW TO UPDATE modRana MANUALLY
Due to the current autobuilder outage, please install the modRana package from the modRana Fremantle COBS repository manually.

Alternatively you can add the modRana Fremantle COBS repository to your sources and update modRana normally:

Just note that this repository is a bit more bleeding edge than the usual Extras-devel uploads. :)

Also, I've got modRana running on Nemo:
http://www.modrana.org/images/nemo/modrana_qml_1.jpg
http://www.modrana.org/images/nemo/modrana_gtk_4.jpg
See this post for more details and installation instructions.

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

[QUOTE=MartinK;1292957]Any progress on this ? From the error message, it looks like a network error. Do you have Internet connectivity on your N900 ? ModRana currently needs Internet to download map tiles. Of course you can download the tiles beforehand and then remain offline. :)

The libqtm* are needed by the QML interface and should not be an issue if you run the classic GTK interface.


Thanks, MartinK;
yes, yesterday I removed modrana, and than installed it via internet connection; everything went smoothly. I extracted the downloaded map file (zip) to .maps/monav_data. I have the directories of 1. the country, 2. routing bike, 3. routing car, 4. routing pedestrian. I also set modrana to load the on device map, but it still does not load anything... do you have any idea what is wrong...? maybe should I try it with internet connection...? (nowadays it is a bit hard, no wireless nearby)

jm

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

The data packs currently server only for offline routing. Offline map rendering is work-in-progress.

Also regarding offline routing - see the modRana offline routing guide & check out the modRana routing data repository for more up-to-data routing data packs.

If you want to see the map while offline, use the "Download" sub-menu to download map tiles for your desired area while your N900 is online. The tiles will be saved to local storage and will be loaded from it once you are offline & on the way.

If you don't need to share your map tiles with other navigation Apps (Mappero, CloudGPS, Marble (?), etc.) you should consider switching to sqlite tile storage in options->Map->Tile storage, as it consumes much less storage space than the default files tile storage method.

Alternativelly, you can use your PC to download the map tiles by running GMapCatcher or modRana (Linux PC only) and transferring the tile folders to your N900 once done.

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

I noticed that after some update its quite hard to click the onscreen button..? is it just me or is there any way to fix it. I tried to calibrate the touchscreen but still the same. Thanks and sorry for bad english.

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

hi, MartinK...!

I'm a bit confused now...: I downloaded the tar.gz files from the repo, extracted it to N900 - .maps/monav_data, but ModRana still does not load anything. I checked twice the proper settings written on modrana.org/offline routing, and did exactly what is written there. So there is .maps/monav_data/Hungary/routing_* - the 3 folders. So: should ModRana load the tiles, or sholud I still be online even though I have the maps on the device...? Or what do I exactly have on the device now...?
One other thing: I installed ModRana on my ubuntu - but I don't find tile folders - can you tell me where this is? I tried to use the download option, but please explain: if I choose for exapmle "around view" and "160km", do I get the detailed map (I mean will I be capable of to zoom in and out)? Also, I don't know where to find these downloaded files - I have no option to choose destination, and I could not find any downloaded file...

So my main question is this: is there a way, to download all the detailed map files (all the tiles, in all zoom level) to be capable of routing totally offline (like with the built in navigation ovi maps)?

Thanks,

jm

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

You have vector data for offline routing. It can probably already give you a detailed turn-by-turn route from one address to another, offline, as long as you have chosen Monav as Routing provider in Options.
These tiles (for OpenStreetMap, in this instance) are stored in "/home/user/MyDocs/.maps/OpenStreetMap II/{zoom level}/{x}/{y}.png". Or they can be stored in sqlite database...
When downloading tiles through ModRana, after you choose, for example, "around view" and "160km", you can choose zoom levels, such as "max down" and "max up". But it might take a lot of time to download them. However, the effort will be worth it. I frequently use 50/50 overlay of OpenStreetMap and Microsoft (Virtual Earth) 'satellite imagery'.
If you know another source of raster images, of maps or aerial view, which you would like to use instead, you can add it to file "/home/user/.modrana/map_config.conf".
Best wishes.
__________________
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Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Thanks to Wikiwide for exhaustive explanation ! :)

I'll just add:
On PC, the map tiles are stored in your home folder inside the .modrana/maps directory. (If your Ubuntu username is for example also justmemory, the absolute path would be:
/home/justmemory/.modrana/maps
As the .modrana directory has . in front of its name, it is by default "hidden" and you might need to enable "show hidden files & folders" in your file browser to see it.

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

yes, thank you Wikiwide, MartinK! I forgot to look for hidden folders... :)
anyway, i get it now; I just have to download the maps :)

thank you very much,

jm

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

Hi,
Thank you very much for the amazing piece of software :)

I have an issue with dragging though. The default mode, full redraw is alright (beside being slow, but that's quite obvious). The "draw visible map" is a lot faster, and awesome for dragging, but it fails to detect when you're pressing a button (menu, zooming etc) instead of dragging a map. So when you try to get to the menu, it keeps moving the map by one pixel, which is quite frustrating.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Get modRana 0.36.6
2. Go to menu, options, map, dragging, select "drag visible map - fastest"
3. Get back to the map view
4. Attempt to press the [menu] button, especially with a finger.
5. Watch how the map moves by few pixels on every press, w/o pressing the button.

Any chance for fixing that in some future release? Faster scrolling is awesome :)

Thanks again for working on modRana.

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

I would like to request support for Google GTFS public transit data.
The specs are public and are available here
https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/
The support would ideally include: (in order of how important this is to me)
1.Ability to feed in a GTFS data set from a URL or from a local disk file
2.Display of stops (whatever stops the GTFS data set contains) on the map
3.Ability to feed in a landmark or location or similar and have modrana figure out how to get from where I currently am (i.e. my current GPS coordinates) to the location specified using the next available public transport service (with the ability to identify that the only way to get there is to catch multiple vehicles and to provide details accordingly). It must also be able to handle walking (walking from where you are now to the nearest transit stop, walking from the final transit stop to the destination and walking between stops if necessary for changing vehicles) with the ability to set a limit on the maximum distance you are willing to walk (i.e. if you set this to a lower value it might then calculate a journey that will take longer in total but require less walking)
Also, the route calculation should have the ability to use stop numbers (if the GTFS data provides them) as landmarks for the routing calculation.
4.The ability to select a stop displayed on the map and see the next services scheduled to pass by that stop with their times
and 5.The ability to overlay a route on the map so you can see that exact route and where it goes (useful so you can see if a particular bus goes where you need to go and also so you if you are on a bus you can see where the bus you are on goes and identify when you need to get off)

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

Would it be difficult when in Night mode to draw the maps in negative colors?

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

Can Modrana share map tiles (Google maps) with mappero? I have a large map downloaded for mappero at the moment (more or less efficiently stored: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=74415 ) and would like to reuse them if possible.

And how effective is downloading OSM maps with sqlite enabled? I mean, how many zoom levels one gets for say the Czech Republic?

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

OK, should be fixed in 0.38.1. :)

OK, that looks doable & useful. :) There seem to be quite a lot of GTFS providers (Googles list, GTFS exchange) already and there is even a module for working with the GTFS format in Python.

Also the prospect of just loading the data once (+updates from time to time) and having the complete timetable for the whole area (where available) seems really useful. :)

I've added your featured request to the Github issue tracker (as the ticket interface on modrana.org seems to be causing issues with new ticket submission at the moment).

I'll probably probably work on this in stages (roughly in the corresponding to the order you've specified) and note the progress here & to the issue on Github). Can't really give a timetable though, due to all the other modRana related work items. :)

And of course anyone who can work with Python is invited to help with this. :)

Thanks for the idea ! I've implemented it in some version prior to 0.38.1. :)

If you use the default tile storage method ("files"), it should share map tiles with Mappero automatically. Of course Mappero only sees the layers it expect to exist, which are IIRC Google, Google Satelite & OSM Mapnik and maybe a few others. It won't see new layers added to modRana after Mappero development was discontinued, such as the Stamen Design layers, the OSM Public transport layer, etc.

This is not easy to estimate. But users reported pretty dramatic space savings with sqlite tile storage, in the order of 1600 MB before and 60 MB after for the same tiles (using the sqlite import script).

Some related remarks:

Why is sqlite tile storage so efficient ?
Empty tiles (white squares) have about 130B, but consume a whole 64kB cluter on the FAT32 formatted MyDocs partition. In the sqlite database they consume only the 130B + a few bytes for metadata.

Tile count per layer
Every layer has 4 times as much tiles as the layer above.

Example: If your download has 100k tiles up on layer n, it will have 400k tiles on layer n+1. 500k for both layers.

Estimating batch download size
Is not easy as it depends on the level of detail in the current area. Generally a city center will require more storage than a rural are on a piece of sea or wilderness.

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

modRana 0.38.1 has been (sort of) released !
Due to autobuilder still being broken, see instructions in this post for instructions how to update modRana manually.

Whats new since 0.37.2:
Nemo Mobile packages available
Installable modRana package for Nemo mobile is now available from the modrana-nemo COBS repository.

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

Yay! Just checked it out, works like a charm. Thank you!

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

Such an excellent piece of work, Martin!