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

I agree with this view; I often have the N900 with the screen locked, listening to music, but expecting verbal instructions from Modrana. However, I think it would be a fine feature to implement as long as it was a customizable option.

GPS can also take a while to connect (I have had it take over 3 minutes), so maybe if this is implemented there should be a timeout (for example, only turn off after the screen has been locked for 5 minutes or something).

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

It seems to me there is some problem with memory management when using the sqlite db. I'm running it with the load applet and after starting modrana the CPU utilization is at its max, though my N900 is overclocked to 1000... It seems maybe the background tile loading is getting queued or something and it gets stuck, very annoying, sometimes it just never loads the tiles and I have to exit and restart it and then it runs. But when moving fast and zoomed in, it seems it would have to load the tiles faster than capable and it just is super slow.

I noticed this behavior after switching to sqlite, i.e. when using the pure tiles method, it was OK and fast, so there must be something that's either slowing it down, or is CPU intensive, but like this it's very bad...

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

Be careful with that.. the load applet shows the actual cpu load, not the cpu speed. I've seen mine looks like it's maxed, only to run conky or another tracking app to show that I'm only running at 250Mhz at a constant 80%, which doesn't trigger the scaler to jump to the next tier.

I've been using the sqlite db since it was introduced, and don't have an issue with it speed wise. (I'm also overclocked, but only to 900Mhz.)

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

all,

According to this post http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=175, one can setup espeak to use mbrola voice file instead of the 'standard' voice.

does someone has a step-by-step how-to guide for noob to set this up; so that we can use it with modRana?

Cheers,

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

Hmmm, very interesting... It has to be something though. Could it be that the db gets messed up somehow, just guessing, and then it has problems accessing the tiles...

I've had many restarts, so am thinking the db might not have been saved and synced or something...

But there's no way around it, I think, like today at night I left modrana running, downloading tiles for a 20km radius or something. In the morning woke up and the phone wouldn't turn on, i.e. it seemed to be on, but the screen wouldn't come on, as if the CPU was overloaded, left it for a couple of minutes then had to rip the battery out and reboot. Had a couple of these, so am thinking maybe the db is bogus... But how around it, if I discard it, I've lost all the tiles I've downloaded...

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

I would see this as an optional, default off feature. + ticket 113
It could use a timeout/screen-off timeout or some other rules.
BTW, what about a key combination for toggling the GPS ON/OFF ?

+ ticket 114 :)
I think I'll stick this to the menu, that comes up after a long press on the map surface...well, when there is one :) Also, I'am planing to add something like an easily accessible Place/Point menu/feature that would report various kind of information about a given point, which could be the current position, a point from the map, a POI, tracklog start/end, etc. I think i could add a "use this point as current position" there too.

Yeah, the current POI support is quite basic :) But I like the suggestions, all of it should be doable:

• group or individual POI visibility trigger
• POI search - search by typing in the list + plaintext search
• show all POI that are on the currently visible map
• custom POI overlay layers that combine multiple rules to show a subset of the available POI
• tags ? + tag cloud :D
• POI/group colors & icons ?

+ ticket 115

The icons with blue background were originally used in Rana, which was targeted on the Neo FreeRunner, that runs 480x640 in portrait, which with 3 columns and 4 rows gives 12 square 160x160 icons :)
I'am slowly replacing the blue-background icons with no-background ones, (that can be batch-rendered by the generate-icons.sh script in modrana/data/gui_source). These new icons are never stretched, just scaled to fit and their background is drawn by cairo - like this, the background can be easily themed without having a complete set of icons with different background for each theme.

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

ad slow/erratic sqlite:
There are a few issues with sqlite in Python(2.5):

• sharing connections between threads is not supported
• concurrent access to the database from multiple connections probably causes the "database locked" errors - there were IMHO no reports about this error since I made the db access sequential (using a mutex)
• sqlite was added in python2.5, so it might be more buggy than in newer Python versions

Because I need to access the database from multiple threads (automatic tile download threads,batch download threads + the background tile loading thread), I have created a tile-consumer thread, that manages all writing to the database through a synchronized queue. To make it more efficient it also writes the tiles in single transaction once it has about 50 tiles in its buffer.

Loading tiles from the db works in a same way - there is a tile loading tread, that consumes loading requests and outputs tile images.

And when just testing if tile exists, which is mostly done from separate (download) threads - I need to get a per-query connection :)

So, its a bit complicated :D

But, thanks to bringing my attention to this, because I might have found some possible optimizations:

• grouping tile loading and existence testing to large transactions, should be faster (less overhead + would help to mitigate possible slowdowns caused by the forced sequential access)
• do a combined load/store thread to reduce the number of active database connections

Any ideas how to further improve this ? :)

I have found some debian packages for mbrola. Anyone willing to help with optifing them ? :)

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

V0.22-3 is out :)

• shifted centering
  • if both map rotation and map centering are ON, the current position indicator is shifted to the bottom of the screen, showing a larger part of the map in the direction of travel
  • this can be configured in Options->Map->Centering, it is possible to set the amount of shift and direction
    (down - the default, up - when you are flying from something, left/right - for driving a harvester :)
• the Options submenu has been reorganized - it is now hopefully more usable when all the various settings aren't on a single large heap anymore :)
• tracklogs now should have correct timestamps for all trackpoints

Provided no significant bugs show up, I'll push this version to Extras-testing. :)

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

Thanks for this, it's great now, much better. Now you can clearly see what's ahead and driving is MUCH more comfortable...

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

It sounds like you're getting hit with the sgx driver bug issue. Check out the linked topic and try the script. I always make sure it's running when downloading tiles, since high CPU, wifi, and GPS use seem to trigger it more often.