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

OK, I have a bit more info on this. I thought it might be a config default or something, so I blew away Modrana (including the stuff left over after an uninstall) and then reinstalled it. That didn't help.
i
However, I realized that it has to do with a usage pattern. If you select route->address to address and then click on "start" with the keyboard closed, you'll get the on-screen keyboard and you can see what you're typing with no problem. But if you open the keyboard, you'll get a little dialog window at the bottom fo the screen that reads "Input the start address". That one uses a black font on a black background. You can see the text if you swipe to select it, which changes the background to light blue.

I don't see anything in user_config.conf to control font colors. I don't have a .gtkrc controlling anything. However, after a bit of exploring, I found that I could modify mod_textEntry.py to fix the problem. After the line:
I added the following hack:
Of course, that's just a hack; it's (almost) as bad to have the color forced to white as to have it forced to black, since it won't work on light-colored themes. The proper solution would be to choose a color based on (1) the theme or user default, if specified; (2) white, if the overall brightness of the background is dark, or (3) black, if the overall brightness is light. But I'm not a gtk honcho, so I don't know how to write that code.

Hopefully, this post will give somebody who knows more about gtk what they need to fix this bug.

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

OK, but it will actually just run once on startup, because thats currently the only time modRana starts the GPS by itself (provided it was not turned off on the last run, in this case modRana respects the setting and wont start the GPS).

Yes, it's possible but currently only the ground track is saved, not the directions data, that would be needed to start navigation on the track. I'm working on including the data, either as similarily named file with different extension or directly to the GPX file.

When it's done :D On a serious note, a first extras-testing release is definitely planed short to mid term. There are still some features that need to be implemented/fixed (+ documentation update) before doing a first release aimed to extras.

So basically:

• "click to start" screen on startup
• display trip distance and elapsed time + distance traveled since last click
• some way to reset both counters

?
Seems doable, I was already planing to add some non-map navigational aids and this would quite fit in (together with that directions + distance indicator) :)

BTW, modRana already uses the shortest, once-per-second GPS-fix update interval provided by liblocation. Could that be too slow for racing ?


OK, I'll add this to the list of possible navigation startup heuristics :)

As there are maybe already a bit too many of the route buttons I am more thinking about integrating last/next turn switches into the directions frame, like this:

|[ hide ][ last ][ next ]|
| |
| turn to X towards Y|
| |
| click to reroute |

IMO, its more apparent like this, that these buttons belong to the directions box.

Were you possibly using map scaling ? If so, it might be related to this ticket. Basically, the scaled map is made from enlarged tiles from a zoomlevel "above", but batch downloader downalods tiles for the current zoomlevel, not the above ones.
I'am going to work on fixing this as high priority, just in case.

Definitely something broken in the drawing pipeline, most probably due to processing more tiles than usual due to the speed.
I suspect the automatic tile download mechanism might be causing this. It basically spawns a thread for every tile that is not found in the local storage.
Provided you are moving fast enough and have a bad Internet connection at the same time, there can be quite a few threads that are contesting for bandwidth and each can live for up to 30 seconds, before its connection times out.
I guess a limit on the number of concurrent auto-download threads might be in order.

But this still should not cause a black screen - just a slowdown, so there is probably also something related, that breaks the drawing.

Please consider logging this behavior next time it occurs :)

Its currently set to fit inside the box, which isn't ideal the reasons you describe. I see two possible ways how to improve this:

• wordwrap it to multiple lines
• use a fixed size font and what wont't fit in - the imost important part is always in the beginning after all :)

Looks interesting, it might indeed speed up some often executed code, like geographic calculations. When working with routes and tracklogs, there is A LOT of coordinate conversions, for all the point that need to be plotted. But it might be quite complicated to properly package for the autobuilder.

BTW, this is how dragging the map with a long road displayed looks like: http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/trac/gps_navig...2-20_route.png
mod_projections, which does most of the conversions, Takes quite a few percent of the combined time modRana used in the expose function.

This is how just dragging the map without any route or tracklog looks like:
http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/trac/gps_navig...ging_long2.png
Whole 22% percent is eaten by cairo (bottom left.center) drawing all the bitmaps being moved around (unlike for example Mappero or AGTL, modRana redraws the map during drag). A single screen redraw takes too long, resulting in laggy map dragging. This might be improved by using clutter, which is GPU accelerated to draw the map. Well, yesterday I got running python bindings for Clutter 1.0 compiled and running, so I can slowly start working on it :)

Um, I haven't added the additional announcement triggers yet :)

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

That's enough for racing :) And yes, an easy access to a one-tap reset action for the trip counter with the trip counter visible and preferrably huge, is essentially what's needed.

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

I've been having lots of these and it is not related to moving. But seems many processes are started and they don't die.

What happens to me, I just try to prenavigate an area where I'll be going, basically just look at the map, move the cursor around. After a set period of time of doing this, let's say 10 minutes, it will always black when moving further, i.e. you move the screen more to a new area let's say south of where you are looking, and it turns completely back. If you move it back south to where you were before the move, the tiles appear. It would seem like a memory leak or something.

Anyhow this happens when driving also, notably, when autocentered, the map would turn black, when clicking on the screen, which turned the autocenter off, the map would appear, and the moving cursor, too. Then as I'd be driving it'd move of the map, autocenter again - black, click the screen - the map is there, if autocenter right away - black... And so on...

Very annoying... It looks to bee like too many concurrent processes, or don't know, but it's not downloading the tiles, as they are already there, but still black...

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

That might be it, drawing a tracklog is generally more demanding than just showing the map. ModRana also currently always redraws the screen, at least once per second, even with blanked screen. This is quite inefficient and a don't-draw-if-no-one-can-see-it optimization is being worked upon :)

These track come as examples for trying out the tracklog management feature. But you have a point, they should be called "example_trackglog_X.gpx" or similar so that their nature would be more apparent. :)
Yep, there also already a ticket for this in the list.

Tracklogs are currently stored by default in /opt/modrana/tracklogs, the path can be configured in the /opt/modrana/user_config.conf file under tracklog_folder.
I will be changing the default path to a "tracklogs" folder (or is there already some well known folder other programs use for storing GPX tracklogs ?) in MyDocs in near future, so that the tracklogs are easier to access.

Well, nothing much, just fixed the context buttons not being hidden with other buttons + made notifications show up when buttons are hidden and fixed directions not respecting language settings. No idea how this should improve performance :D

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

So this is not a voice nag app right?

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

Sounds like a plan. :)

Nope, I've never quite understood the scaling options, so I've never changed them. I'm actually quite unclear on why I'd want one vs the other.

The 30 second thing would fit in place with what I saw. I also had an issue near the end of the trip where it was on/routing for 4+ hours where it complained about "Operation canceled due to lack of memory". I "fixed" that by closing and restarting the app though, as I was semi-lost at the time. ;)

I will... how big are the logs it generates with normal usage? If they're small I may just turn it on and let it log everything, then chop out the parts I need later for issues. (I need an on-screen debug widget/button! :D )

I always like option 3: User setting to choose which one. ;)

There was mention in the article about another project for N900 using it. You may be able to get hints on it from that package maintainer? If you're not hitting a wall yet though, no big reason to pull it in right away. If on-device tiling causes contention later though, this may be helpful. ;)


Wow.. nice map. What profiler are you using to generate that? Is it just for python? I code mainly in C/C#/C++, so not too familiar with python and it's tool set. Nice look to it though.

Hmm... Odd. It's been much better about warning 3 to 4 miles out since the update to 19. Maybe it works better on trips with longer distances between points? Is the length of the segment used at all to compute how early to trigger?


Overall, sounds like you've got plenty on the plate to work with. I'll happily test things out with new releases as they come out! :) I'm also hopeful to getting things setup (build env, etc) this weekend to start porting the tile server. I probably won't have a release before Monday, but if things go smoothly... we'll see. :)

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

This might be a silly question but I couldn't find it in the menu or on screen menu. Is there a way to see all the directions at once? When I'm the navigator my fiancee often wants me to tell her the next two or three steps which I can't seem to do with Modrana.

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

That's strange, but after the latest update I see no buttons, no menu.
Here is log from X Terminal.

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

The batch download might be buggy. I've been trying to download a 40km area in this webcafe for ages, can't get it done.

The log shows it's going fine for a while:

Batch tile dl working... (threads: 7) pending: 86618, done: 3608
...

Then

exception in get tiles thread:
database is locked
....

a number of times. Then the download seems to go on, but much much faster, super fast, which is impossible, and of course the tiles are not downloaded...