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

It should be together with with other logs in the "Logs" section in the Tracklogs menu.

BTW, I will be moving the N900-default tracklog folder from the current /opt/modrana/tracklogs to something like modRana_tracklogs in MyDocs in a near release. I'll add migration code to the installation scripts so it should be quite seamless.

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

Quick feedback on new map rotation feature: I gave this a try yesterday (while walking). The map appears to rotate well according to direction of travel (even at a fast walking speed) - however the route I was following got a bit confused - it didn't seem to be rotated by the correct amount to keep it aligned with the actual road I was on. I only tried briefly, so I'm not sure whether the route (a) rotated, but by an incorrect amount or (b) didn't rotate at all. Once I switched back to fixed map orientation, the route immediately realignd.

The good news is that I gave the "rerouting" a pretty good workout, and it performed flawlessly (and the x2 map zoom made me very happy!!).

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

As a bicycle user, I'd like to use modrana when riding, in order
either to keep the route and to check the speed. The latter is
an issue, because:

1. The speed value isn't correct. The ratio between the value
detected by the speed meter of my car and the one displayed by
modrana is about 1.8.

2. The speed is displayed only in the "bicycle" mode. Even if it
is OK when I'm running my bicycle, it should be useful to be able
to read the speed in the other modes, too.

3. The map would be more readable if I could switch off the blue
boxes "activate a track to show route profile" and "activate a
track to show rem. length", as in all the other modes (which,
on the other hand, don't show the speed).

Last, but not the least, I want to thank Martin for his wonderful
job: congratulations!

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

Last night i decided that i wanted to cash the map tiles for the area around where i live. I told it to go 2 up and 2 down in a 10km area. It said it needed ~24,000 tiles. I then "click to calculate disk space needed" and it said it would take somewhere around 60mb. It was going slow and so i let it sit overnight to download. This morning my /.maps folder is 1.8gigs. This is just slightly more than the 60mb i was expecting. And that's not even for that many zoom levels or a very large area.

I'm kinda of glad i didn't tell it to download the max up and down in the 160km radius i wanted, as that told me it needed 1.4 million tiles. Based on the size of my directory that would have put it at a 104GB download just for the 2 up and 2 down, let alone with max. For some reason this doesn't sound right, as maps for the entire world for ovi maps doesn't even take that much space. Actually, for 1.8 gigs i could have downloaded the whole western US, not just the 6 mile area around my house.

Any suggestions how how to fix this disk space issue, as i would like to get a 160km radius, would be great.

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

I hope you didn't tell yourself "It's 60MB i'll use 3g" :)

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

Oh, and some quick feed back:

1) I love the app. however i would really like it if when i pressed the menu and gui buttons it didn't take me off of centered map mode and make the map stop moving with me. Kind of annoying to hit "Reroute" and then have to hit the center button again.

2) When i hit reroute when i am on the highway, it puts the start point as where i was when i hit the button, but it doesn't count me as having arrived there, and thus starts counting UP in miles till i reach my point (because i am driving away from the point it wants me to be at). So i have to wait till i am closer to what the next step would be and then i have to restart the navigation "at the closest step" in order for it to start giving me proper directions again. I even tried setting it to 500m "reach distance" to see if it would count me as having reached, but because i am moving away from it to start it never considers me having arrived.

3) It would be great if i could turn of those "activate a track" dialogs. It would also be great if they were themselves buttons that could be pressed that would do what they say on them, and would then make them disappear and leave just a small button in a corner somewhere that said "stop" to stop the track.

4) Actually, it would be really handy to have a "start/stop a track" button on the main screen. It would be a great replacement for the full screen button (and the full screen button could be moved to the "title bar" menu (as in i click on "modRana" at the top and a menu drops down from the top giving the full screen option. Then perhaps just have a shortcut key that restores it).

5) A list of the current short cut keys accessable from the menu would be geat. Like a "Help/About" button right next to "log a track" in the main menu would be a great addition.

6) I would love to be able to change the time display to 12H time instead of 24 hour time.

7) I would love to be able to change the color of the text on the navigation read out. With the current color scheme i have to get about 4" from the screen to read the mile count to the next point.

8) It would be awesome if the map was on top of the route and tracking lines. That way if i want to look ahead on the map for the names of the upcoming roads/highways i can tell what they actually are. As it is the dark blue route line covers all the names of the roads.

9) Is there a way to get a text read out of the turn by turn? This would help alleviate some of the annoyance of #8.

10) If there is any way to boost the frame rate that would be awesome.

Thanks for all the hard work your doing on this. I love the app and the espeak integration for the turn by turn. The loads of features is awesome. Great job :)

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

I'm sure this issue is mentioned earlier in this thread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cluster

Ovi maps uses a vector format whereas modRana uses bitmaps. The former is generally a lot more space efficient.

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

Haha, no i was hooked to my home wifi, thank goodness. I have unlimted 3G (already at 3.9gigs for the months and still have 2 weeks left before the reset), but i doubt it would have even finished by morning had i done that.

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

I was looking through the folders and it looked like they were mostly .png and .jpg. But still, it gave one estimate and the result was much different.

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

This thread has a clearer explanation of the cause of this issue. HTH

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

You are right. I ran the command he has in there to show the file size usage vs actual disk space. Actual files is only 81mb. the Slcak waste is what balooned it up to 1.8 gigs. Now to search the forums to see if i can change something to get rid of all the slack waste.

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

I haven't tried it, but I agree with one commenter in that thread that a loopback filesystem might be the best way to go. Try these instructions as a start & let us know how it goes :).

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

Thanks for reporting this ! I managed to reproduce this, and a fix will be in the next release. :)

I opened a ticket for this and will investigate.

All these blue boxes (the "activate" boxes, speed, time, coordinates) are basically configurable widgets. The can be currently configured using the /opt/modrana/user_config.conf (which is quite heavily commented), per mode. The "widget" support is in an early state, they should interactively configurable (which ones, position, size, colour, etc.) and optionally clickable when finished - a lot like the Fremantle desktop widgets.
I think I'll disable the "activate" widgets in the meantime.

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

Well, that's a bug and will be fixed. Only dragging the map should disable centring, not clicking/pressing buttons.

This is probably caused by the slight routing delay (modRana uses the Google Directions online service for routing), so you are already too far away from the start when it gets the route.
Frankly, I cant find an easy fix to this right now,that would not broke some other use case. I could trigger skipping the start when the distance counts up, but that could also trigger on some larger intersection loops, etc.
What about:

• skip tu next point if distance from current increases for N secconds
• big "go to next step" button/area

I already commented on this, they will be clickable and configurable from the menu in the future, but I will remove them in the meantime.
BTW, they already work:

• select a tracklog
• go to tools
• select "make active"

Of course, the tracklog should represent a route you will be travelling, or the results are pretty meaningless :)

You mean the the tracklog logging controls ? Yeah, that could be possible, basically a logging control widget.
BTW, I like the drop down menu idea. It could be done like this:

• you can dock buttons/widgets you don't need at the moment
• just move them to the dropdown dock
• you can use them from the dock or move them back

If you mean keyboard shortcuts, there are currently none :D But they are, of course, planed :)
Some sort of built-in help/documentation should be added, some features are getting quite complex.

OK, this can be added.

OK, this should be quite easy to add.

What about a transparent route (with configurable transparency) ?

You mean like having a browsable list of all the direction steps somewhere ? Or something else ?

Well, I spent two days (well, not FULL two days :D) analysing and profiling the main drawing code. Dragging the map in my current not-yet-released version is IMO noticeably less laggy, also the GUI reacts faster as the modRana now checks for redraw request 10 times more often (10ms vs 100ms) :) I also got a few ideas for further improvements.

Thanks ! :D

The space estimation currently just asks the server about the size of the individual tiles and and them counts a sum of all the individual sizes. That's would be quite precise in an ideal world, but as already mentioned, there are unfortunately filesystem clusters in the real world :)

So, what can be done:

• I can add the cluster size to the size estimation feature, so it is closer to the actual result :)
• pack the tiles in some transparent single-file filesystem
• store the tiles in a sqlite database ?

BTW, every non-standard method will break the current tile sharing between the various tiles based map aps that use .maps

IMO, a transparent single-file-fs proxy linked to the .maps folder would be probably the best.

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

MartinK - I tracked down the bug which was preventing search results from working in australia, and attached a patch for it to
http://modrana.org/trac/ticket/21#comment:2

I'd love to see this included in the next release :)

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

V0.15-2 is out. What's new ?

• dragging the map should be a bit faster
• the GUI should react faster on clicks and other events
• the "activate" widgets don't show up by default
• you can now choose between 12 and 24 hour time display
• the route now rotates with the rest of the map (thanks Pigro)

Known issue:

• when you select a start/or destination while the map is rotated, it is not placed on the spot where you click

I have been using modRana over an unstable GPRS connection for the past few days and the blocking while waiting online service results is really annoying. So, in the next version, there should finally be the asynchronous online services usage - modRana will show some sort of an overlay with a cancel button while waiting for the result of an online query.

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

thank you for making this app :)

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

FYI, I followed dead_orc's advice here ... and I have now got eSpeak talking over music in modRana. The only issue is that the overall volume jumps quite high (both music + synthesised speech) for the duration of the eSpeak output, but there's probably a simple fix for it somewhere & I can live with it "as is" no problem.

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

Yeah, i hadn't read the whole thread yet when i posted. Glad to hear that will be fixed :)

A "skip to next step" button/area would work for me. It would probably be a bit complex to check the direction of travel against the step one should be on to see if you are actually on the route between step 1 and 2 on a reroute and thus have it switch to step 2 automatically.

I actually discovered that after my last road trip when i was poking around looking for stuff. It's what inspired me to ask for a help guide :)


Yes. For instance, when i first fired it up i thought the blue boxes were buttons that should be clickable and do what they say on them. I thought they were just buttons that hadn't yet been implemented since they didn't do anything when i clicked them, and didn't seem to change when i hit "save a track log". Knowing the difference between saving and activating a track would be helpful in this regard to new users.

Not a bad idea. Moving stuff off the screen when it's not implicitly needed or wanted would be good. I'm always a fan of more "customizability."


Yes i meant keyboard shortcuts. :)


Sweet.

That would be a better way of implementing it, yes. i wasn't firing on all cylinders when i suggested the other way. ;)


Yes. Like a press a button and bring up the directions themselves in text form, turn by turn. Like when searching on google it's got them on the left side of the page. This would make it easier to share directions with others who might not have a GPS unit.


Cool. I just thought of another one: Is there a way to easily pull up the reverse directions? Now, my memory is pretty good, and i am not bad at retracing where i have been, but a "reverse route" button somewhere would be handy.


Yeah after looking into it i see there isn't much that can be done on your end just because of the way the cluster sizes are set up. Kind of a shame really. I really wanted to grab all 1.4 million tiles. I'm thinking about repartitioning with a fake loopback MyDocs to help save space and make it doable. As for the best way for you to handle it i'm afraid database management and single-file fs's are over my head (as is the loop back at the moment. more studying to be done. this is my first go with linux.).

Looking forward to trying out the new build!


Side note: I hit the "activate all tracks" button (as button mashing is my primary means of learning how things work), and then when i exited to the map all of the buttons were gone and i had to kill the program from the power switch as it was non-interactable. And since then the screen is only black when i load the program. Any suggestions on how to get the screen back and the program usable again without having to purge-reinstall? :)

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

Have to say, I'm loving modRana, and will probably be using it from now on. Two things that are big on my list though:

1> Is there any way to save the current location (or enter a searched for location) as a POI? I know if I search for a place, like a bar or a restaurant, I can save that as a POI. But if I search for an address, or want to record my current location as a POI, there seems to not be a way to do it.

2> Is there a way to specify a filter for eSpeak? I could put one in myself I suppose by making eSpeak a script that filters it's input and feeds it to the real eSpeak executable... but that's kind of hackish. :) I'm just a little distracted by "Turn right on Main Saint" and "Turn left on to Hickory Doctor" (for Main St. and Hickory Dr. accordingly. ;) Having a way to pre-filter the speech just for modRana would be best, since sometimes I'll want Dr. to mean Doctor (like when announcing a caller).

Overall though, this is a great program. It's a little complex at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's really quite simple to navigate and get it to do basic things you want it to. And it's super speedy/non-CPU-intensive compared to most of the other nav systems for the N900.

Thanks for the app!

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

Quick reply...
Side note: I hit the "activate all tracks" button (as button mashing is my primary means of learning how things work), and then when i exited to the map all of the buttons were gone and i had to kill the program from the power switch as it was non-interactable. And since then the screen is only black when i load the program. Any suggestions on how to get the screen back and the program usable again without having to purge-reinstall?

Move file
/opt/modrana/data/options.bin
somewhere else, and start modrana.
All options reset, all problems go away.

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

MartinK - thanks for implementing my patch :)

Quick question - what's the easiest way to checkout the latest modrana sources? I had a bit of a search through your trac site but couldn't find instructions.

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

FYI, on the discussion about setting up local on-device routing, I thought you may be interested in this article about how someone got a set of routing programs setup locally on the N900. I'm betting with a little tweaking it could be turned into a package that would allow users to setup a routing server on their own device. May not be the "best" solution, but better than nothing when there's no network available.

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

Nice find ! But integrating this could be a bit tricky, as it basically modifies probably quite important system configuration files. This can be basically done only during the installation, as the application has the root privileges needed to modify the system configs only during installation. I think I'll just link to the howto, so users can enable this when they need it. Or something like an "enable eSpeak over music" metapackage ?
There are probably some DBUS commands for interacting with the media player, so something like pausing playback when modRana activates espeak could be doable.

Yeah, this could probably work in most cases. Just find the nearest point (in case you skipped more that the first point) and then check towards which point you are oriented (rerouting is mostly done when moving so the current direction should be quite accurate).
Then either leave the closest on, if you are moving in the opposite direction switch to the next.

Yeah, they are just not finished yet :) They should be clickable + configurable when complete. BTW, actually adding new widgets (logging button/indicator, custom search widget, etc.) has sense after in GUI widget configuration is implemented. Or 95% users would simply not see the widgets as they would need to enable them by editing the config files.

This could be done quite easily, but there are a few caveats :)
The routing takes one-way routes into account, you can see this when you swap the start and destination, the resulting route is often different.
When you just reverse the route, modRana could basically send you to one-way route from the wrong direction.
Also, if your route includes a highway, following it in a reversed order is NOT a good idea. :)

There is still a chance that a incorrectly formated tracklog can crash the drawing code...before it can draw and setup the menu button, so the tracklog drawing can't turned off :)
The current workaround is to move/delete /opt/modrana/data/options.bin file, as this is where all the options are stored.
I have recently found another tracklog that is causing this, so I can reproduce this and look what goes wrong. I hope I can find the root cause this time.

The current POI functionality is basically just a proof of concept. It is going to be completely revamped (sqlite for storage, configurable categories, tags, etc.), and better integrated with other features. Storing about anything reasonable as a POI will be supported :)

ModRana is already applying a few filtering rules after getting the route, as the directions contain xml tags that need to be removed/replaced before letting espeak to read it. For example, bold tags are replaced by the espeak <emphasis> tag, etc. Filtering according to a file with keyword:replacement pairs should be quite easy to add. I've already added a ticket for this feature to the ever growing ticket heap :)

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

Well, thanks for the patch :) Every form of help is welcome! :)

There is a source tarball in the download section, that Is generated together with the other packages by my buildscript and is generally available not long after pushing the package to the Maemo repositories.

I use a SVN repository to manage the project sourcecode,
but direct anonymous read only access to the repository is unfortunately not working. The SVN repo together with the trac instance is hosted by our faculty's NLP lab, I'll ask them if they can enable it.
The repository can be browsed through the trac web interface, under "Browse source", the main branch is named "trunk".
You can download the current revision as a zip file using a link on the bottom of the source browser page :)

Thanks, I'll check it out!

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

I think ThePooBurner means swap start and destination points and reroute :)

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

Quick reply...
"It is going to be completely revamped (sqlite for storage, configurable categories, tags, etc.), and better integrated with other features."

I don't like SQLite... because I cannot read sqlite files by vi

Again, thank you for the application!

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

Hey MartinK have you seen this yet?
http://blog.mikeasoft.com/2010/09/24...en-street-map/

Could be some useful stuff in there.

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

One problem I've noted is that most of the data-entry screens (e.g., route destination address) seem to use a black font. That doesn't work so well against the 900's default black background...

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

Dears,

I'm located in Egypt, any idea if this will work with me or not?

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

Sure it will work, in any country.

Just get GPS lock, open the application, choose in the options->map what tiles (images) you want to use (Google, OpenStreetMap, Google Satellite, Yahoo Satellite, Virtual Earth... wide choice) and then try to zoom in/out: either (if you have Internet) modrana downloads needed maps automatically, or you need to attach device to computer, in mass storage mode, and use PC to download the tiles:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/C...le_downloading
At first, I just manually saved images from
http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Browse/tile/ZOOM LEVEL/X Coordinate/Y Coordinate/
but recently, I started to use JTileDownloader

OpenStreetMap can have not good coverage in some areas; its advantage is the fact that you can personally make the map better, instead of filling in feedback forms to a company like Yahoo or Google.

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

OK, now I get it :D

I'll lok what can be done. BTW, which one do you like beter ? The current modRana entry method or the default edit-boxes-on-the-page one ?

Well, yeah, but its IMO the easiest way how to manage many POIs with categories, tags and easy adding and removing. It should be also easier to add new functionality just by adding a new table, etc.
Without using a db of some sort, I would either have to dump and load the whole datastructure each time, which could be slow and adding new features would be problematic in regard to already stored user data. Also, If I saved each POI as a file, I could hit the cluster issue, as with the tiles.
Of course, there will be CSV export/import for backup and db content examination purposes.

It seems that there are 3 components:

• memphis - vector map renderer
• libchamplain - a clutter based map display widget
• spatialite - a Sqlite extension that provides the actual routing

Spatialite is available from the repositories.

IMO, you basically load some OSM data the database, perform some special queries and you get the route as result.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in the current Maemo version of Python, that makes it unable to load sqlite extensions.
There also seem to be Python-bindings for Spatialite, but they are not in the repositories and would need to be packaged first. Also, there is the question if they would work with the current version of Python.

There is also the possibility of running some sort of a separate routing daemon, with the added benefit of sharing the routing data between the numerous navigation apps (as mentioned by Woody in his comment to that article) on the N900.

Concerning Memphis, the vector map drawing library, its currently not in the repositories. But if someone packaged it and its Python bindings it could be IMO quite nicely integrated with modRana. Vector map support would mean (simple) maps of large areas from small OSM vector files.

An (old) version of libchamplain is in the repositories, but unfortunately without its python bindings. It could theoretically be used as an alternative map drawing widget and could be faster as the current modRana implementation because libchamplain is based on clutter which uses OpenGL ES for rendering on the N900.

Any interested Packagers/PyMaemo people ? :)

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

First off, i want to say that modRana was an essential tool for the Boston-to-Canada bike tour i just completed. I decided it fit my use case better than Navit because i was pregenerating routes in Google Earth/maps and needed a lightweight app to display the track overlaid on a map with several different map options for different tasks (i.e. satellite images for finding good campsites, topo cycle map for seeing hilliness, OSM for seeing road names and features). So, thanks for your work!

However, all wasn't peaches and cream:

• I found the process of precaching map tiles to be very time consuming. Ideally i wanted to download all the tiles along my route at a zoomed out level and a zoomed in level, and just switch between them. This proved more difficult than i had anticipated because
  • there's no indication of which zoom level you are currently at (besides the scale bar). Recommendation: show zoom level in download menu and/or provide absolute zoom level options instead/as well as +/- levels.
  • 5 km is the minimum range option, and 5 km to either side of a 450 mile route at a high zoom is a lot of tiles. Recommendation: provide a 1 km or 1 tile option.
  • The number of tiles doesn't seem consistent with the actual coverage. I wish i could comment more on this, but basically i mean that it's possible to see the tile boundaries on screen and the actual number of tiles needed is a lot less than the estimated number that modRana wants to download at times. This may just be confusion on my part/loss in translation about what's going on. Recommendation: no idea. :p
  • Ability to omit zoom levels accessed by using + and - icons in GUI. Perhaps this is an option in the configuration file. Bonus points: It would be really neat if there was an option that would only step up/down the zoom if the tiles are already cached for the present view area.
  • The UI for activating tracks is a bit confusing at first, but once i figured out what was going on it was ok, if a bit cumbersome. The ability to click-and-hold on a track on screen to access its menu would be wonderful, but i realize that may not be easy to implement.
• After browsing through a lot of different areas of map, especially with different maps enabled, the N900 becomes unresponsive and requires a reset.
• Even without browsing around in the map, if i left modRana running for an extended period (say > 1 hr), it eventually would cause a lockup or reboot. If i was careful to close modRana after each reference i had no trouble, but the process of starting up and loading all the tracks was time (and battery) conusming. Activating a track seems to aggravate this tendency. I noticed a few times after the N900 had reset that the battery was significantly drained (e.g. 8 bars to 2), suggesting something had pegged the CPU. This led to some really tricky situations where i had to delay the trip a bit to charge up. I don't report this by way of complaint because i knew taking a new and relatively untested app along was signing up as a beta tester, but hopefully this report will help these issues get worked out.

Due to these issues, i used the gpsrecorder app to track my route instead of modRana, and that worked okay.

You could make this a configurable option, i guess, but i don't use any other tile mappers and would really appreciate some solution to the cluster size issue. Even just adding some hack like the ability of modrana to read into .tar archives in the .maps directory that a user creates by hand would be fine with me.

Thanks again for your work on this. It's fantastically useful for this kind of usage!

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

Any chance of getting together with the other devs to work out a solution that all the mapping programs can use? Maybe someone could write a library to abstract out the reading/writing of the map tiles :)

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

I'm currently working on this :) I'll post more about this and respond to questions as soon as can I get it to a releasable state.

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

I have just sent the newest V0.16-1 to the autobuilder, the main feature is, as promised, the experimental sqlite tile storage support! :)

What is this good for ?
As mentioned earlier in this thread and also in a related Mappero thread, tile take up more space than expected because each tile, even if only 500B in size, takes a whole 64kB cluster.
When using sqlite for tile storage, there are basically just 2 files per layer, not the usual tens of thousands of files and folders.

How to enable sqlite tile storage ?
Go to options->map and switch tile storage from files to sqlite.

Is it stable ?
It seems to work OK for both normal automatic tile download (including overlay) and batch download. But some errors can still can show up, so please report any unusual behavior when using this ! :)

What about the 4GB maximum file size limit on FAT32 ?
When a size of the storage database reaches 3.7 GB, a new one is added. The is no limit on the number of storage databases.

How does it work ?
The tiles are stored in a sqlite database as blobs. There are two types of database files, lookup.sqlite and store.sqlite. The lookup file stores an database that indicates in which store the requested tile is. The store file has the actual data. Multiple stores should be numbered in ascending order, starting from 0:
The storage database looks like this:
The store databases look like this:
The only difference in the structure is that the lookup databases only stores the name of the store for given coordinates and the store database stores the actual blob.
Both also have a table called called version which has an integer column called v. There is a single 1 inserted, which indicates the current version of the table.

These database files are stored in the
corresponding layer folders.

When looking for a tile in the database, modRana first asks the lookup database and when it gets an answer, it asks the store described in the store_filename for the given coordinates.

Could this be used by other navigation apps ?
Why do you think I just roughly described how it works ? :D

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

Great job; it's nice to have a workaround!

I haven't used modrana this week until today. I only had it open for about 10 minutes (it was still trying to get a GPS lock) when it locked up the device while the screen was blanked, similar to what i described above in my previous post. Is nobody else having trouble like this?

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

I've never had it with this app, though I have with Mappero and BarrioSquare. I'm betting it's more a GPS lock bug than a modRana bug. User processes shouldn't be able to hard-lock the device.

Awesome... One question though: Does this clean up the existing map files, or is that an exercise left to the user? :) I'll find out in a minute, and I know it's only an rm, but something you may want to mention. ;) Thanks for all the great work on this! I've been using it pretty regularly, and it's been a real life saver at times. Now if I could only save where I'm at as a POI... :D

Two small things to consider:
1> When presenting "miles until turn", maybe the user would prefer only a few digits of precision? 0.34 miles is fine, vs say 0.3405938451 miles. :)

2> Another e-speak filter for numbers... apparently "Turn right in 0.3452943523 miles" turns into "turn right in miles", vs "turn right in zero point three four miles"

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

I can use Ovi maps, Navit, or GPS Track logger without any trouble. This is something specific to modRana. :(

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

Progress update
I have been improving the sqlite tile storage integration and also took a look on the batch download feature. The old implementation did not reuse open download socket which was slow and inefficient, so I integrated the urllib3 which enables socket reuse. I got a bit entagled in all the threads used to handle all of this (there is the main thread, the thread that is running the download threads and a consumer thread feeding tiles to the sqlite database as it cant be used by multiple threads) but it seems to be finally sorted out. Next release should be therefore coming quite shortly.

Nice to know that modRana is being helpful ! :)

You can see the current zoomlevel when you click on the edit button in the batch download menu + it is showing the resulting zoomlevel range.

OK, I'll add 1km option, maybe also 2km ? I checked if it's possible to use sub kilometer values but an implementation detail currently prevents this. Concerning the 1 tile corridor, I'll have to check the source, its been a while since I wrote that part of the code :)

Yeah, it is quite confusing. This is because it is quite time consuming to check which tiles are available and which need to be downloaded. ModRana currently just lists the maximal number of tiles that would be needed, thats why there is the ~ before the number :D
I changed the size estimation function for the next version so that it removes tiles that are available, so it should show the number o actually needed tiles after the tile estimation job finishes.

There is setting in options that disables the automatic tile download...but I'll have to check if it's actually working/implemented :)

The activation should be much easier when widgets finally become clickable, etc.
Regarding the tracklog selection, what about a longclick near the track + "do you want to select track XY"popup ?

The next version will have a logging feature (basically stdout piped to a textfile in MyDocs). This may help to find the root cause of the lockups. BTW any guesses why such hard lockup can even happen ? IMO there is a hardware watchdog that is checking multiple device parameters and should prevent this or just restart the device...

There is definitely room for improvements in power-saving.

I was thinking about skipping the drawing loop if I can detect that the screen is off (it currently redraws even when the screen is blanked - as do many other apps IMO). As drawing and module state updates are two separate loops, logging etc. should still run normally.

I could also add less pretty but more power efficient optional drawing methods (like not redrawing the map while it's being dragged, moving the map just once a while (like in mappero), etc.).

Well, modRana shares the same map folder with other tile based apps (mappero, maep, AGTL?) so if it just ate the tiles and stuffed them to the database (which could be doable IMO) the other apps would not be able to use them.
If you just want to get rid off the files and don't mind the other apps, just manually remove all the numerically named subfolders in the map layer folders.

Thanks for reporting this ! I'll fix it :)