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

I didn't see any errors during download the couple of times I tried from the desktop computer. I am now traveling and using the N9 with whatever I allegedly downloaded from the desktop and am also downloading "manually" from the phone.

It seems to work fine to be honest, except for the odd missing tile (error downloading it, or corrupted, etc. as you suggest).

I'll report more details when I'm back, as copy+paste during the console in the N9 can be a bit uncomfortable. I'll also have a play migrating tiles from the file system to sqlite :)

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

Hmm, I'll have to check, there might actually already might be some simple redownload in there (quite long time since I wrote this part of the code).

But sure, it might by possible to improve this quite a bit - I especially like the idea of trying to redownload a failed tile if a few tiles get through fine. :)

BTW, even with current tile download implementation, there is a workaround:

• modrana has a tile cache used to display tiles
• tiles displayed on the map are drawn from this cache, including failed tiles (a tile-failed image is loaded from the cache)
• this cache is fixed size and new tile requests are continuously replacing the oldest cached tiles

So if you zoom a bit or move around, the failed tiles will get bumped out of the cache and be downloaded again once you revisit the area (as the will be no tile file in storage as download failed previously). Still might not be really possible if you have bad Internet connectivity to begin with...

I think I'll add a log-to-file toggle (modRana can do that) to the QML GUI ASAP (vkb terminal copy paste indeed sucks :) ).


modRana 0.43.4 has been pushed to Extras-testing
The latest modRana release seems to be stable and don't have any critical bugs so I've pushed it to Extras-testing! :)

So please test and vote based on your results on the Extras-testing package site.

Technical note: 6 positive votes are needed for the package to be promoted to Extras.

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

Is there a way to disable the time display (white characters on blue background) that appears superimposed upon the map display?

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

The overlays (time, speed,...) can be adjusted form /home/user/.modrana/user_config.conf , where you can disable and enable various displays over the map depending on what mode you are currently using the modrana (driving, biking, walking,...). There is also some time and distance remaining overlays, but I never got them to work even when using activated tracks or routes.

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

Hi Martin,
Offline routing still doesn' works for me. Are there any news regarding the botched Monav data repository update?

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

Hi,

I'm playing with modrana-gtk and modrana-qml on N900. On gtk I'm able to get zoom > 1:6000, but on qml the maximal zoom is 1:6000. Should it be like that?

/edit: and after downloading the monav data pack, the tiles which haven't been visited aren't loaded. Why?

Thanks

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

There is no zoomlevel limit in the GTK GUI, as simple as that. This makes modRana GTK very future proof and ready to support atomic-scale map layers once (if ever ? :P) they become available. :D

Regarding the QML GUI, its is quite possible it is some hardcoded zoomlevel limit, maybe even from AGTL, which is the original source for the PinchMap element used by the modRana QML GUI.

This could be definitely improved upon, as since some time the modRana map definition file lists maximal zoomlevel for layers, so that could be used to set the lowest zoom, based on currently displayed layer. I guess also some sort of override might should be available, so that you can zoom in to arbitrary zoomlevel - for example to work with closely situated POIs that are overlaid on low zoomlevels (well, once they are implemented in QML GUI).

So I'll probably leave it without limit on GTK and use the max-zoom-per-layer with override in QML.

The Monav data packs (BTW, I should really finally fix their updating) are currently used only for offline point-to-point routing.

Actually It does not even support offline address-to-address routing - the Monav preprocessor can create an address database, but there is no external interface to it. The database format is described here:
http://code.google.com/p/monav/wiki/...TournamentTrie

Any takers for Python parsing module (ctypes ?) so that modRana can use it for offline address lookup ? ;)

Monav does support some sort of vector map rendering, but that is unfortunately internal functionality without any external interface (like for example telling Monav to render tile images), that modRana can use.

The current plan for vector map rendering is to use the Kothic Python+Cairo MapCSS using map renderer, but suggestions for alternative (preferably portable) renderers are also welcome. :)

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

And is there any way to preload all the maps (let's assume OSM) for a given country (assume Poland).

There are many types of maps available for modrana. What are their advantages/drawbacks?

I have an idea how to improve modRana qml on Fremantle. Maybe I'd be able to make a pull request but, would it fit: to make the fullscreen button enable/disable statusBar, and to enable minimize/close in the bar?

About theme, as in the source: meegotouchtheme-nokia-icons (blanco) is in the repos. The only missing package for blanco theme is meegotouchtheme-nokia-graphics. But it might not be needed there.

Thanks

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

And one more question: the monav pack from modrana page for Poland is a couple bytes big: http://www.modrana.org/data/monav/europe/poland/
The one from the original monav page is ~300 MB big (compressed). Why the difference?

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

It was answered before, see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...9&#post1379199 and from MartinK's last post I think it's still on his ToDo list ;)

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

You can use the Download submenu to batch-download tiles.

There is a slight disadvantage that some tileservers might ban you if you donwnload too many tiles. :) Other than that, it is all just png/jpg/gif(really, even gif!) images. So it all depends on what layers you need. :)

Sure why not - but I think people it might be good to make this optional with a switch in Options, as most people probably expect the current behavior shared by most other Fremantle applications (switching between fullsceen and system-bar-is visible states). :)

BTW, I remember modRana QML being more crash prone when running with the system bar shown, so this might indeed by a nice way to have status info, minimize and quit & less chance of crashing. Might have been fixed by a CSSU update in the meantime though.

OK OK working on it! :D

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

One thing I've always found confusing about the Download submenu/dialog is that it prompts you for + 0 down or + 1 down etc. I don't undestand what that means in physical units. It would be more helpful to me if it asked for something like 10 meter res or 100 meter res etc. Just listing up and down choices gives me no clue about the results I'll get, because I don't know what the app is going down from, and I don't know if +3 down is three times as fine a scale as +1 down, or 10**3 times as fine. Perhaps this is documented and I should just RTFM, but I haven't seen it.

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

I've always assumed that download menus down and up is from current zoomlevel and refers to zoomlevels (when zoomin it shows briefly the zl-number you go to), but haven't actually seen it documented anywhere or tested to see if it is correct.

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

Correct, +down/up is relative to current zoom level on map, and reffers to zoom levels used by current layer(s).

OTOH, it wouldn't be possible to use "10 meter res" or "100 meter res", as some layers vary significally in that matter - it's up to layer's creator discretion to decide, which res will he use on which zoom level.

It may be obvious to most, but still worth noting here - zoom level isn't what common language reffers to with "zoom" normally. Zoom level in map layers means, actually, different tilesets, which aren't "zoomed" at all - they're drawn in ModRana at their original resolution. They're pre-rendered by layer creators to show more/less area.

"Real" zoom could be introduced with vector maps, but, of course, it excludes out satellite-photo layers.
---

Frankly, I always found ModRana's batch download quite flexible and user-friendly - I just set "zoom" on map to desired level, go to batch download, and set area + if I want to have close-up or further away views of that area, too.

It is worth to note, that most of the times, MB size of "further-away" views is negilible (*much* less tiles), compared to more close-up views, so is is usually wise to download "max up". OTOH, when adding "down" (closer view) layers, size increases expotentialy (much more tiles needed to cover same area for close-view zoom levels).

Still, if people are asking it, it is worth documenting (I hope this post contributes to that ;) ).

/Estel

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

This is an issue with all OSM based navigation tools. I remember the first time I tried Marble. It just confused the hell out of me since using it assumed I knew all about how OSM maps are laid out. I was expecting using it like you use any other decent navigation tool: download a map for a specific country as a single file. But no, you needed to faff around with tiles, zoom levels and all that stuff.

Modrana made it a bit easier, plus it was (is) being actively developed so one could (can) get help from the thread. It was Modrana that helped me to understand how tile based maps work and what you need to do, with backwards enlightenment implications on Google Maps and other, similarly tile-based services.

Still, I would prefer if there was a "download a map pack for a current country" option in Modrana rather than "download tiles at +X -Y zoom levels in Z km around me". But that could be achieved only if the maps were vector based. It took me nearly two weeks(!) to download all zoom levels in a strip of just 2° LON and 1° LAT around where I live, on a PC with a fast internet connection. The total takes over 8GB of disk space. And that is less than 10% of the entire country.

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

Well it'd download all the tiles of a layer in a specified radius. But It's a pita to download tiles for a whole country. The .pbf or counterparts are vector maps. Is it possible to render them to png (or sth else) and then mapconvert to sqlite (or event to convert .pbf to sqlite directly)?

Btw. batch download is a little tricky about terminology. Is around here the center of view or my gps location? Is around view around the center of view or simply x km outside of the view?

As for me, there's no use in enabling the status bar, as it causes the interface to be cut off (or is it just an illusion?)

It might be written in the help that left corner minimizes, etc.

OK, so we might have the reason for this:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12634

The problem is: inean seems to be completely offline/ignore maemo stuff. So the thing complicates. We might try to use the latest gitorious components - 1.3 (or even the nemo ones (1.4.8)). For the 1.3 meegotouchtheme-nokia-graphics is needed. The reply I've gotten for the uploading is:

Does that mean a permission?

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

I still can't download tiles a large amount of tiles around my area.
After about 20 minutes of downloading the device switches off.
I seem to have to download small amounts and increase the area bit by bit. I'd still ideally just like to download my country in one hit.

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

I use JTileDownloader running on my PC for big batch downloads.

I've also had the "device unresponsive and getting hot while Modrana downloading" issue. Hint: Martin, would it be possible to throw 'nice' in there somewhere? It looks like we are being hit by the watchdog kicking in.

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

Never, ever, got any performance problems while batch downloading large areas in ModRana. Could be related to swap related settings + swap on microSD, as it sounds similar to problems some people have while downloading/extracting big archive packages (like easy debian).

/Estel

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

I've had the same problem with very large batch downloads (the ones supposed to take hours) on both of my N900. After half hour or so the device rebooted. Neither of them had any special swap setting that I can think of only swappolube installed with recommended settings.

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

I'd wager that it might have more to do with your network speed. With a slow enough network Modrana will spend enough time idle to allow the watchdog to recover.

I've never had a spontaneous reboot during Modrana downloads but I've had a lot of symptoms described in post #1497. This on devices with all sorts of configuration: stock, CSSU, swap on SD... makes no difference. If I leave it on its own for long enough (like 30 minutes or more), it wil get to the stage when the device appears completely dead and takes minutes to react to anything. Some people may not be that patient and may hust take the battery out - as I did once with inevitable consequences on the FS.

I guess if my network connection were any faster then I might even experience reboots like sixwheeledbeast.

Easy Debian is similar. I've never experienced reboots during large downloads but I have experienced them while copying the entire ED directory in one go. I've resolved it by either copying it in smaller chunks or by smacking 'nice' in front of 'cp'.

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

It's a bit off-topic here, but just too to clarify - I've been doing it on very slow connection (16 kb/s), and on very fast one (faster than N900's wifi chip can handle, so it was limited by hardware, not server bandwidth, or mine).

I *used* to have same problem as you describe, looong ago, before moved swap to microSD exclusively *and* I've applied swap-related settings like ones, that I recommended in ED thread (based on freemangordon's ones, just tweaked a little). Since that, no problems, no matter how big files I download, move, extract, or compress. I've compressed whole ED images to lzma (and de-compressed them) on device, being able to do other things on it without major slowdowns - from browsing, to talking via phone.

IIRC you have tried my settings without good results and it puzzles me. But, I'm absolutely sure that correct setting have potential to fix such instabilities, as those are clearly results of so-called "swap hell" - maybe some devices need other settings (could eMMC chips be different between production series?)? Or maybe fact that my swap on SD is 2GB in size have something to do with it, too?

/Estel

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

Same issue here, device is frozen (albeit if you touch it, it's hot as hell:P) when downloading not-so-large sets of tiles (it happened few days ago when downloading tiles close to a route ~50km long, the overall download size was 60-90 mb, can't remember exactly now). I have swap on SD (was downloading tiles to eMMC so no read-write conflict) and the device doesn't reboot when doing heavy stuff with ED. Estel, do you also seem to have thumb? I'm on cssu stable on this device. I'll have to download another ~50km long route next week, I'll reswap (using your ereswap tool btw) before using modrana, then download tiles and use ereswap again (maybe modrana is using so much ram that it gets swapped to hell - then I should get the message that we are >9k over swap borderline and reswapping is needed), I'll post results then (although I doubt that 80mb of tiles could fill my 768 swap completely more than once, but you can never be sure unless you check;)).

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

Yes, thumb. As for your case - I suspect that the problem is with large number of small files, more than a size of those files. Swap-related settings may be tuned for effective "burst" handling of things (which tends to "froze" device, though", or for handling everything in small chunks - little slower, but is more multitasking-friendly (watchdog is a kind of additional task too, mind you).

Also, CPU power may have something to do with it, too - I'm using 900 mhz as max, "since always". Your description about hot device seems to indicate that CPU is very busy handling I/O, which is strange - in all cases I've described (packing, unpacking, big files or many small files) my CPU is quite busy, but not extremely (nothing like 100% usage). Maybe you or pichlo are limiting speed lower than 900 mhz, and it gets choked at 100%?

/Estel

// edit

I still doesn't feel right that we're hijacking ModRana thread for this (even if it is remotely related to ModRana, i.e. to batch files handling).

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

Different SD cards with different write speeds, perhaps?

Still, I don't understand why swp should play any role. Things are either in the RAM or in the swap. They should not be switching bewteen the two for hgih priority foreground processes.

Oh, I've just noticed: yes, my CPU ws also oveclocked to 900 MHz. To be honest, I assumed that that was the cause of the overheating so I reduced it back to 600 MHz but don't remember what the effect was since I no longer do big batch downloads on the device itself.

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

To smash in some more offtopic (not related to modrana ;)):
I am using swap on SD (two times 2 GB) and using fmg/Estel's settings and still these unresponsiveness/reboots sometimes occur on heavy/big file transactions.

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

Yep, Modrana kills my device every time if I leave it running. Even just leaving it running whilst I'm walking around in a city and not batch downloading tiles. I've had to pull the battery twice and now only open it, find what I want, close it and lock the phone again. Which is pretty inconvenient.

Mappero and all the other tools I've used haven't had the same resource-hogging issue, but I've actually grown to like modRana nonetheless - especially since Mappero's routing option stopped working (presumably Google changed something on their side).

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

MartinK: Can mapnik (on a Linux PC) be used to generate tile map from osb to be copied onto N900? How? Thanks

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

Are any online services are now available?
There was the ability to track/find logged in friends via TangoGPS service but that service is defunct and I do not see any options in the current UI.

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

Today I had to download 20 mb of tiles, and I did this result. The steps (and results) follow:

1. launched ereswap, reswapping was performed
2. launched ereswap once again, noted the value of what was left, let's call it "X" (it was almost 500 mb)
3. launched modrana, waited for it to get gps fix and load tiles around my current position
4. launched ereswap again - the "left" value shrinked by 60mb - which means starting modrana uses 60mb of swap
5. entered route (address to address), searched it via google and started navigation, chosen option to download tiles around my current route - it was ~15k tiles, summing up to ~20mb, began downloading, stopped after 1/3
6. launched ereswap - the "left" value shrinked by 30mb while downloading <7mb of tiles (but I guess it could be also caused by the routing start)
7. chosen option to download tiels around my current route again - ~10k tiles left, suming up to ~13mb, paused at half (so that was again 1/3 of whole batch)
8. launched ereswap - while downloading <7mb of tiles this time "left" value shrinked by almost 15mb
9. downloaded the rest of tiles, launched ereswap and noted the value - 10-15 mb this time
10. closed modrana

Please note that modRana and xterm were only applications running, no incoming calls, no sms messages, nothing more. The tiles were downloaded via wifi, kernel-power 52, no bleeding edge drivers. I guess the only thing using swap in large chunks was modRana then. Someone should repeat my tests to be sure, but my experience is that modRana swap usage during tile download is more or less 2x size of downloaded tiles (I'm ignoring the first 1/3 batch here, as the routing start could also take ram/swap and interfere with the measurments). In my opinion, that shouldn't make the phone freeze, so the bottleneck must be something else.

edit: I trust the ereswap used swap measurement method is correct, I haven't analysed the code (just pointing that out, as it could also have influence on the result and its credibility).

edit2: I used N900's stock swap configration for this test (e.g. /proc/sys/vm/swappiness set to "100").

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

I belive it to be correct, and I agree that it isn't enough swap activity to be bottleneck. *But*, actual memory activity of sole ModRana might be even lower - remember, that how swap is used, is determined by swap-related settings.

I mean, that after initial reswap'ping before staerting ModRana, you had "fresh" allocation between memory and swap.

Now, depending on how aggressive swaping-out routines are on your setup, device would start to move-out some things to swap with passing time, even if you wouldn't be doing anything on device - more or less quickly.

Now, again, dependng on your settings, increased memory "consumption" by using ModRana could "convince" swaping routines, that more things need to be stockpiled in swap at faster pate, freeing memory - even if actual memory consumption is much lower.

In any case, ModRana itself hardly have any control over it.

/Estel

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

Stock configration for this test (e.g. /proc/sys/vm/swappiness set to unfortunate "100"), I'll add that to my previous post.

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

Reuse memory rather than allocate-free constantly?

I imagine this might be difficult to achieve in a Python application.

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

For those crashing phones on big tile downloads I have flopswap installed just so I have my swap on a different partition than wherever I am saving or transferring a large file. There are also swap settings that eliminate the swap pileup but flopswap is far better.
BTW repeatedly crashing your phone like this with CSSU installed is a fast way to reflash land.

Another topic, early in this thread there was talk of adding location sharing between devices so my map pin can find or track another map pin in town as long as we are both logged in to a map server like was possible on older modRana with the position sharing server from TangoGPS. What happened to that feature?

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

MartinK: In reply to http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=449

If this motivates you, I can help porting python-mapnik2 to Fremantle :)

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

Looking at the Mapnik Python docs it indeed looks nice! :)
So I'm all for it - if you can port it (and its dependencies), I'm sure I can make it show something usable in modRana. :)

Some possible concerns:

• dependencies - Mapnik seems to have quite a lot of dependencies (no problem if you can manage to package & build them all :) )
• scaling - the example in the docs is just rendering country borders, for normal usage in modRana a much higher level of detail is needed & for a much larger area
  • getting data - could be from Geofabrik or from other extract site
  • data access - IIRC Mapnik is using postgis (PostgreSQL with some geographic extensions, making it possible to query distinct regions easily) for data storage & access, so that might be another dependency that might be needed (or maybe Mapnik supports some other format more suitable for mobile use ?)
  • rendering speed - Mapnik servers are usually pretty beefy machines, but I would say with a simple enough style (like for example routes & route names only) we should hopefully get some usable rendering speed

Question backlog
As I'm as busy as always, while I follow the modRana thread I'm not always able to answer all questions right away - I'll try to do something about it in the next few days. :)

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

I gave it a try

http://marmistrz.net63.net/public/ma...0.0+ds1.tar.gz

Simply untar it.

Install debhelper7, python2.7 and scons, ignore other dependencies.

Fails on some python stuff. You might experiment with stock python2.5. I removed --with python2, as it's non-existent, uses --with python-central instead.

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

Got the build process working. Simply disabled SBOX_REDIRECT_FROM_DIRS - is utterly slow, but at least works. Any suggestions for a less dirty workaround?

Now libproj is missing, building it right now.

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

If you'll face some problems with proj4 or gdal packages, post here, I'll try to help. I've spent countless days (>2 weeks) at work few months ago to get together, compile and use a few geo libraries to write quite complex geographical converter (and reading/writing/manipulating data with gdal can be a pain in the lower part of my back at times).

Edit: also, I don't know if anything changed during this time, but gdal could easily eat up hundreds of megabytes of RAM if used without caution, so if there are any python gdal bindings, be careful ;)

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

libproj built (now some minor tweaking). Waiting 'til the builder updates my ssh pubkey and I'll push it to devel

/edit: I can't do it even through the autobuilder. stuck (tried with user agent tool)