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

Awesome. :)

I think the idea was more to make a "jump to zoomlevel" setting. I know often I want to zoom-out to see the full path (say level 9), and then zoom back to the level I use while moving (level 16). Right now, I need to hit +/- 7 times, and it tries to load those tiles as I'm zooming, which I won't ever want to see. And turning off auto-download isn't a good solution, since I want that on most times to update areas I haven't been through before.

Maybe a screen widget can do this? Can the widgets do things like "jump to zoom level 16"? If so, I could make one for 9, and one for 16, and just jump between them.

Another issue: The reason I need to zoom back is because there's no way I've found to jump to the destination on a route. When using address lookup, I like to verify that the target looks sane, since I've seen Google return bad results at times when it doesn't quite know where something is. (eg. Putting you in the middle of a town when it can't find a street.) Being able to jump to a turn or the destination would be a nice feature. :)

That would be great. :) Also, saving routes is currently broken. When you go to save, it says "loaded in XXms", but doesn't give you the option to give it a name, and thus save it as a route. It does auto-save it with a time-stamp name, but with no way to rename it, it's not so useful. :)


Mappero stops drawing when the screen is off (may be worth a look to see how they do it). He also has a bit of code to keep the display on if the device is in motion. Handy if you're doing a short trip and don't have the device plugged in to a charger.

Ah... right. Forgot that. :) Hopefully they'll be able to use the same backend. For now, I've found I've been using modRana much more than the others. But then I already have 2 copies of maps (1 for Nokia, 1 for the rest)... so really, whats 1 more? :)

Thanks again for this awesome app!

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

Thanks. It seems there's room for both, so that would be great.

Actually i was looking at the code on my flight home and it seems it uses powers of 2 to specify the range around the origin to download. Based on that it seems that only 2.5 km is available, but it's likely i missed something. Could you please explain what that power of 2 number is and how one could specify an arbitrary distance? It was trivial to add the button to request 2.5 km but i haven't had a chance to test if it actually works. It does make me wonder if the range is in km--it almost seems like it might be instead some multiple of the current map scaling. That would make my experience with downloading tiles make more sense.

Hmm that's not really what i meant but that is a good improvement.


woody's interpretation of what i was trying to say is right. The disabling of downloading works great, and i like having it. What i'm looking for is a way to disable certain levels of zoom that i don't use.

Sure, that would be great. If it's close enough to the track it would be better from a UI standpoint to skip the query.

Should be, but i can get the same results with MAME (others have verified that), so the watchdog isn't doing its job or something. There are two different problems--one is that the ui gets frozen in whatever state it is in. The other is that the device crashes and shuts down, so maybe the watchdog catches it sometimes.

Please. Also, if this fixes the lockup/crash problem it will be a bonus.

I don't use the "follow location" mode, so that's not important to me, but sounds like a good idea.

I really appreciate your responsiveness to issues and work to improve modRana.

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

Well, sorry in advance if I will now repeat myself or someone else here but just where is the "save position" option in this app?+?????
I mean: here I am, in the middle of totally unknown place, in a foreign country, some smiley driver has just brought me to some sort of a hotel. Ok. I'm still alive and that's definitely a good sign. I grab my N900 with ModRana in it, all nice and ready to go but....how the heck do I pinpoint my, what they call, hotel on the map in my device so I could at least hope to find my way back?
Come on, people, isn't it the BASIC service of all the GPS software in the whole jumping world??? Or have I not spent some 30 mins yesterday thumping my fingers out in search for that simple option and supposedly basic option in Modrana???? Name it whatever you want: "My POI", "Favorites" or "My stuff" but that's what you need to have in ANY GPS...or am I dreaming?
I mean....I've been receiving every now and then messages from this stack on improvements - this is just great! But how about improving it so it fits the end user BASIC needs?

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

@reeby - not an answer, but a workaround:
at your hotel, do menu-> search -> near position -> sleep -> hotel
this will (hopefully) show you the place you're at as the closest of the returned options. Select it, and then
tools -> add to POI will save it so that you can later refer to it (menu -> POI then Go to/Show map/Route to etc.)

It's still devel software, remember :-).

ps. I haven't used the track logging stuff in modrana, but I'd assume that if you log a track starting FROM your hotel, that would let you later view the track to help you plan a return?

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

Thanks, but it wouldn't be a nice option in the middle of Siberia.

Nice try. Thought about it. It it would probably be a turn-it-on-and-put-it-in-your-pocket solution if Nokia has turned on their brains (or whatever they have up there) when they were making a decision on equipping this monster with a 1200 battery.
No hard feelings but that's how all the great apps originated, didn't they? Devil, primers, betta or what else they called them those days. But that's the start. And on how attractive this start is, depends how successful the software will become. After all Microsoft has started in a stinky garage.

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

If you have been following this thread then you would know how responsive a developer MartinK is. Need a feature? Ask nicely and I'm sure he would consider it. In fact a huge amount of the changes/additions to the program since its initial release are as a result of users' suggestions.

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

Exactly my thought two months ago:D
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=118
I have all the respect in the world for this guy. And I'm sure like every talented person he could use some voice from the dumb user, devil's advocate opinion, fresh look.
What use for me all this "squilte" options if the app is missing the essentials?
I mean, yes, I could always go back to Mappero but...I do like the developer's drive and attitude and (believe it or not) still have all the trust in the app. That's why I'm sharing my concern here and now. Otherwise, I would've just pressed "uninstall" last night.

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

Just create a gps track for a few minutes. It will show you where you where (the hotel) and the impact on battery life is very small.

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

Fair enough, and I agree that the ability to add any random map location as a POI would be very useful (i'm sure MartinK will consider this when he sees your post, probably just an oversight that he missed your original request).

However, POI's or Street names will work as I described in 99% of cases, so I don't see it as a biggie to wait until the developer gets around to looking at it for you. The other stuff he's working on is important to optimise download sizes, and if you're ever caught in your siberian wastes then you'll be needing a large preloaded set of map data regardlss of POI's (as you'll have bugger all mobile coverage I reckon).:)

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

Updated and giving the sqlite a good work out. Some things i've noted so far:

1) On the initial switch it didn't import the tiles i already had into the DB. Not sure if this was just doing something wrong on my part or if that just how it is.

2) When downloading for a particular zoom level, it downloads according to the zoom level used in the map scaling preference. For instance, if i have it on x2 scaling and i tell it to download, it downloads the levels below, which it should but it's not clear if that is all it is getting or if it is also getting the actual zoom level you are on (assuming "0 down/up" as the batch download setting). Of course when i first fired it up i was forgetting i had the scaling on and so when it told me it needed 330,000 tiles i was a bit taken aback. 5KM around from my location at the zoom level i was "at", visually anyway, is only about 25 tiles when using the scaling. I figured out that it was downloading the actual zoom level and not the current displayed level of zoom.

3) When there are large numbers of tiles being downloaded, say over 400 (as i've done a couple different batch downloads), the count downloaded doesn't update until it is finished, so you have no real idea how much time might be left in the download.

4) When there are large numbers of tiles to download, and you "click to estimate size", it simply freezes the phone for about 30 minutes and then causes a hard reboot. Download sizes that have caused a reboot when estimateing, 48K, 98K, 330K, 498K tiles. I've since stopped asking for an estimate and have just gone ahead with downloads (though i jumped from 400 to 98K in my downloading. The data counter is spinning so i know it's working, but as mentioned in 3 the display in modRana isn't updating). Even with a small amount of tiles (400), the estimation took a long time to finish and hung the phone for a few minutes.

EDIT:

5) Large tile downloads take a lot longer to download than you would think. I get about 100KB/sec down here at work but the download (which is using almost 96-100% cpu) is only piddling along at about 12.4KB/sec. is there any way to get it to us more bandwith and finish sooner?

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

Oh another things i just remembered. I have it set to use Miles, as KM is meaningless to me. It would be nice when it is set to miles to have the batch download also display miles. (5mile radius, 10 mile, 160 miles, etc.) This would help out those of us who don't use KM to figure out how far around us we've actually just grabbed.

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

Quick reply...
I'm waiting impatiently for Point-Of-Interest.
Just like:
1. Click button;
2. Input text description;
3. Get a clickable pin at your current coordinates, which displays the text when clicked.

Useful for bus stops, benches, names of streets (Ct or St?), etc. I cannot keep them all in the head!

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

+1 :)
4. Option to navigate to it (integration with existing POI's)

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

V0.16-2 just hit the repositories :)

What's new ?

The main improvements are in the batch tile download functionality. I have added support for socket reuse, which is faster and puts less strain on network infrastructure during large downloads.

I have also reworked the inner thread logic, so the download/size estimation starts immediately after pressing the corresponding button/area and it also should now be much faster.

The size estimation run now also removes tiles that are locally available (in the db/file-system) and removes them from the download queue - you can see how the estimated number of needed tiles decreases each time it finds a locally available tile.

Other than the batch tile feature, I have added basic logging support, that can be enabled from "options>debug->Log modRana stdout to file". A file named modrana_stdout.log.txt should then appear in MyDocs with the terminal output from the last modRana run. The rounding bug for imperial units in navigation should be now fixed and sqlite tile storage should be more stable.

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

If sqlite storage is used, can it still use the file-based tiles at the same time? Eventually this is maybe not needed, when mappero also uses just sqlite db. One has to just reget all the previously saved maps.

Does modrana convert the old file based maps to sqlite when the change is made in the options?

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

Really looks like a job for a widget. I really need to finally revamp the widget feature to a usable state :)

Good point, this should be added.

OK, I'll try to do something about it :)


Interesting, I'll look how Mappero does it. Also, some control over screen dimming in modRana is really long overdue.

The map tiles use two integers as X and Y coordinates. By incrementing and decrementing the coordinates it is possible to easily move to the neighboring tiles. The function that gets coordinates of tiles for a given area uses this.
It finds which tile is near the center of the area and then spirals around the central tile, until the distance from center (measured in tiles) reaches a given number. This number is that power of 2 value you mention.
It looks like this for size==1:
This is not ideal and some sort of absolute distance - tile distance is needed to support wider range of steps + imperial units.

Maybe both modRana and MAME use the same OS component/library/GUI toolkit that triggers this ?

ModRana uses:

• Python 2.5
• GTK + cairo + pango
• python-liblocation
• sqlite (only recently)

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

As there seems to be quite a big popular demand for it, I think I'll do the POI improvements next :)

Thanks ! Feedback is very important, especially for new features.

This is working as intended. I have already mentioned that I don't want modRana "eating" the possibly shared.
I'am considering files->db import functionality, which may be handy for people with many already downloaded tiles or for importing tiles downloaded on the PC.

Yeah, as it is just scaling tiles from one zoomlevel, it should download tiles from the same one, not the one "beneath".

This all (speed, GUI responsiveness, long freezing, etc.) should be fixed in the recently released new version. But it was quite an extensive rework, so please let me know if you spot something not working as expected :)

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

Yep, both are totally independent.

Currently not. I am considering some sort of an optional batch import:

• select folder
• select target layer
• select if you want to remove the tile-image-files after import to db
• start the batch

Could be quite handy if you already have many tiles or use a desktop for downloading the tiles.

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

MartinK,
Are you accepting donations? I'm thrilled that someone has:

1) Finally integrated google map images into a GPS app on Maemo
2) FINALLY integrated online POI search with google maps

I would like to donate a small amount to encourage you to continue making this application even better :D

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

Thanks ! :D I have added a Paypal donation link to the end of the first post.

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

Hi MartinK

Regarding SQLite storage, I came across the Mobile Atlas Creator (formerly known as TrekBuddy Atlas Creator - http://mobac.dnsalias.org/) which is a maps downloader tool that can download various maps to various formats for the known GPS nav apps for other devices. It can also download to certain SQLite formats, namely BigPlanet Tracks SQLite, Oruxmaps Sqlite, and RMaps SQLite. If I downloaded maps using this tool to one of these formats, would it work with modRana? Thanks.

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

Downloaded the new version and running tests. Settings are Zoom 14, download batch setting 5 up/5down (so 9-19 is the end result).

Applause: The check feature definitely runs faster, and the total tiles needed is faster. Everything is faster. ALOT faster. Kudos. :) After telling it to get a 10 zoom level 20+KM range before it would take a long time to even show the download screen with the number of tiles needed. It now only takes about 5 seconds. The check runs a lot faster, too, as in it actually shows its progression real-time rather than freezing the phone for 20 minutes before causing a reboot.

Feedback:
However the Check feature may not be working quite right. Here what i have found so far.
1) Still shows KM and not miles in download area. Not sure if that was one of the fixes mentioned in the change log, but it seemed to be.

2) If you run a check for a given area (ie: 5km, 10km, etc.) and all tiles are considered available, if you just hit "edit" and increase the size and check again it will continue to report that all tiles are available no matter how high you go.

3) if you hit Download anyway, despite #2 above, because you know you don't actually have them, it will finish without having downloaded anything (as noted by the lack of change in disk space) and tell you that all are now available. if you then return to the map and scroll to an area where you know you don't actually have tiles you will just get a black area, and the menu buttons disappear, and the program becomes unresponsive (or rather, unuseable since three are no buttons and the screen can no longer be scrolled) and has to be closed.

4) After restarting the app: going to batch and starting a download for the area you tried to download in #2, it will run normal and start downloading all the missing tiles. However, if i wanted to check the size of the download before letting it continue, to see if it would actually see that i didn't have them, i hit stop and then check. It said i would only need 1.8mb of files, so i hit continue download. As opposed to the slow pace at which it was going before (reporting 2-4 tiles downloaded per second), it was showing thousands downloaded per second (the same speed as the check) and finished without downloading anything. repeat the black screen from #3.

Repeating #4, but this time not running any checks, just letting it download and it is working so far as i can tell. Disk space is going down and my GPRS data counter is moving. So far i am up to 1400 of 371,759 tiles down,space used ~2mb. Should be ~500MB downloaded when finished based on that, which sounds about right. This is a 20KM area i am grabbing of dense city.

Conjecture: The checking and being done and thiking it does not need to download tiles may be an anomoly to me, as the data base may have been marked as downloaded them all when i tried to do it with the last version, even though it had frozen and didn't finish. Or something to that effect. After i finished my current download of my city, i will move to another area that i know i won't have any tiles for and i will try the exact same steps i have done above to see if the results are different (as this would eliminate the possibility of the DB thinking i have the tiles when i do not).

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

More Feedback:

Seeing as the download is going to take sometime, and i like to use my phone for lots of stuff, i thought i would try using it a bit while the download was in progress. I got to 8761 tiles down, and then i used FAPMAN to download an app. This caused the download to stall out and stop. Has sat at 8761 for about an hour. The program was unresponsive for a bit when switching back into it. Took a while (~30-60 seconds) for it to register me hitting the STOP button. But i hit the stop button then tried hitting the back arrow to gauge the responsiveness. it jumped out to the menu in one swoop once it became responsive again. It is now responding normally. I am going to attempt to start the download again and see what happens. I have Facebrick running in the background, so we will see if it work to download while there is still something else using the modem.
-------
Ok, so hitting the start key has seemed to freeze the program. Unresponsive for about 5 minutes now. Going to kill the app and try again.
-------
Closed Facebrick and opened Pyradio (Pandora). Downloading batch with same settings. Quickly went up to 4866 (which i would expect), but has paused before getting to where i would expect (8761). Waiting... Ok, been paused/stuck there for 30 minutes now. Took 5 minutes for it to respond to the stop button. Going to stop, close, and try again without pandora (i usually have pandora running all day when here at the office so it's a more normal usage scenario. have it on in the car too, but with all the tiles i am downloading it will be a bit before i can check onthe fly downloading while pandora is on and i'm in the car.)
-------
Trying again without pandora on, but without a restart first. Might work, but i don't want to wait. Seemed to be frozen. Probably just really slow. Closed ("this program is not responding, close?"), and trying again.
--------
Ok, without pandora/facebrick running and going from a fresh start the download counted up at a rate of about 800 tiles per second and now says that all tiles are available. Tested as usuall by going to the map screen. All i did was zoom out twice. Interface disapears and program freezes. there is a black strip on one side where some of the tiles i am supposed to have should be. If i close the program (and it closes normally in this instance), it opens to my base zoom level. Hit zoom out twice and i see the green download indicators on the side where the black stripe was for a second and then the tiles fill in.

I think when i get home i am going to try deleting the DB files and downloading over wifi and see what happens then. I will also see about uploading the log file that modrana makes now.

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

Yeah, hitting zoom out a third time i only had 1 tile downloaded already, which means it never actually grabbed the 3rd level up on any of my download tests (which i did 5, then 10, and then 20, assuming based on it telling me i had everything available on the 5 and 10 settings all of the above was done on the 20KM setting.). Also only had a few of the 3rd level downward. Not sure if this is a DB file problem from having tried to download and haing failed batch loads so many times, or if it's a program error. So tonight when i get home to wifi i will wipe the DB files and go from scratch and see what happens.

EIDT: Doh! i forgot to turn logging on so i don't have anything from all the testing i've done so far today. Phooey.

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

Never heard of this tool before, I'll have to check out the structure of the files it produces.

This may be a bit more complex to fix than expected. Basically, after examining the (older Rana-heritage) code a bit more throughly, I found that it actually uses some tile coordinate derived (scale dependent! :) ) unit and not plain kilometers as I thought. Before some conversion code is added, I can just switch the labels and and the would not be much difference in precision :D


I tried to reproduce the stuck "all tiles available" bug and the black screen without success, but I have found and fixed a probably unrelated bug in the size estimation thread.
There may be some different circumstances involved, like a corrupted database file, different database size, etc.

I did a quick test and once reproduced the stuck/very slow download with the standard media player running, but it worked normally next time. I also noticed some skipping in the music, from time to time.
BTW, the tile download is potentially quite resource intensive as there are multiple threads involved and quite a lot of disk access, but it should not be so bad as to basically freeze. Could you try look on the CPU usage if/when something like this happens next ?

Good idea, maybe the database got corrupted during the testing, the commit mechanism in the previous version also wasn't too robust.

Also, just an idea:
When you get some weird results (like slow response, freezing, black screen), could you also try if the same happens while using the file storage ?

This could help to discern what is caused by the database and what by the download/threading logic.

That would be really helpful!
Please note, that the log file is currently overwritten each time you start modRana. I guess I'll have to add a dedicated log folder + numbered log files... :)

Also, thanks for the feedback, it is much appreciated ! :)

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

Ah-hah! So i'm not crazy. :D

Thanks for testing and reporting, TPB.

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

I made another update, V0.16-4.

I finally managed to reproduce the failed size estimation followed by a black screen, as reported by TBP + get a log out of it.

Looks like it being caused by two separate issues - database becoming inaccessible and failed loading of status tiles.

I hardened the code running both, so it now will either work as intended or at least should not get the application to an unusable state and should print an error message.

I have also noticed during testing, that MyDocs sometimes becomes read only (for all applications). Did anybody notice something like this before ?

I don't know if this is caused by modRana or some other program accessing MyDocs. It can be fixed by connecting and disconnecting in mas-storage mode or by restarting the device. An appropriate mount/umount command would IMO also fix it.

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

Regardless of modRana, I had MyDocs turning itself into read-only, and the only way to solve it was a reflash + eMMC reflash.
I think the problem was corrupted files copied over FTP/USB Mass Storage.
Specifically, Music with odd encoded folder names which got messed up.

I found it in this manner :
remount /MyDocs as rw (don't remember the exact command)
then while being root, run
It will basically display ALL the files/procs/handles on your device.
If it reaches any currupt files, you will get an error and the mount will switch back to read only.

I also had nitdroid installed, and I thought it might be it - but I don't think so.

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

This would be a bit easier

Without specifying a -name it defaults to all files & will display only the error output from the command. HTH

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

Thanks, does modRana support (or plan to support) any of the formats in which the maps are distributed on downloads.cloudemade.com ?

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

downloads.cloudmade.com offers mostly vector maps (like OSM XML maps). Modrana right now uses mostly tile maps, non-vector.

Ask MartinK about future plans.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Experimenting...
Theoretically, using XML, XSL, SVG and OSM files would allow you to open map in XML-supporting browser. Firefox loads it without errors, if the osm file isn't too large. But it shows nothing. Just white page. What does it mean? It should render map, described in data.osm, as SVG. But the page is white.

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

Currently not, but when some map-renderer gets integrated into modRana, the per-country files from Cloudmade can come handy.
They provide per-country POI databases - this could be integrated near-term to provide offline-poi search.
And there are also some Cloudmade provided (tiled) map layers, which could be added.
Concerning adding new map layers, I really have to improve map layer switching. The current toggle method is IMHO no longer suitable for so many layers :D

You mean like converting OSM to SVG by some XSLT magic and then displaying it ?
BTW, try Inkscape, its a vector graphics editor with good SVG support.

Development update
I'm currently doing the POI functionality rework. The database structure should be Mappero compatible, but modRana will use its own database file by default. Like this, users should not mess up their potentially extensive POI database from Mappero without explicitly enabling it in options.
I'd also add automatic import from the old non-db storage.

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

V0.17-1 has been finally released ! Sorry it took so long, but the POI rework was more difficult than anticipated and I had to fix many things in many places :)

What's new ?
The POI functionality has been totally reworked, you can now:

• store POI from multiple sources
• easily route to any POI
• organize your POI to categories
• any "old-style" POI are automatically imported
• CSV POI export (for Wikiwide :)
• optional POI database sharing with Mappero

Also, many small improvements like a new and more flexible listable menu implementation, route info button for all routes, routing from search results or per session debug logs.

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

First - very nice program - totally dumped OVI maps since finding this, a few months ago - congrats!

Second - a quick Q for all users here: since upgrading to this new version, 0.17 (maybe related, maybe not - but on the new PR1.3 platform) the phone completely locks up after a few minutes of having the program up, and nothing, except for taking the battery out, allows me to "revive" it. I also lost all POIs previously created.

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

I had that same issue a few months ago several times, had to remove the battery, don't know it if had to do with my being overclocked and undervolted, but it is not a new issue.

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

I'm neither overclocked nor undervolted, but with version 0.16-4, the issue has just occured to me (first time I allowed ModRana to connect to Internet directly). The screen went black, the LED is green, the device ignores both power key (even long press) and lock slider. Remove battery, start up the device, and everything works fine.

It has just occured in version 0.17-1, with modrana in background and X Terminal in front. GPS is turned off, as well as network positioning. Online mode is on, but neither cellular connection nor WiFi are connected. Screen can dim itself when left for several seconds, light itself when touching it or sliding the keyboard, but ignores the slider, power key and any keyboard keys. Windows cannot be switched or closed. Camera doesn't start when lens opened. "Swipe to unlock" screen and device lock don't start either. The only way out is to remove the battery. Who can recognize the bug?

And a separate issue (in 0.16-4; I haven't encountered it in 0.17-1 yet):
At first, ModRana displayed green "Downloading..." tile each time it downloaded a tile. But sometimes, the tiles are just black until downloaded.
Can it be related to "NameError: global name 's' is not defined"?
And also: "** this exception occured: 'ysat_11_1822_1232'".

I have updated to the newest version; the postinst script is still causing apt-get to claim that modrana is neither fully installed nor removed.

The points-of-interest system is awesome.

By the way, what is options->logging for? Log a track in the main menu is the working button, while options->logging seems to influence nothing.

:)
Misprint in file
directions_filter.csv
St.;Streat

And, when GPS isn't available or "centre map" is off, don't redraw modrana until dragged. I agree that when "centre map" is on and GPS is available, you need to redraw continuously, (even with screen locked), but when GPS isn't available or "centre map" is off, you shouldn't redraw until user drags the map.

Good day, thank you!

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

Qlandkarte caused me similar total lockups, both oc'd and not, pr1.2 whilst logging tracks. So I guess something or other triggers a severe system bug...

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

I mentioned the locking up a few pages back. Since then i've found that undervolting using the power user kernel causes the problem. It may even be just some difference in the kernel itself that causes the problem, regardless of voltage settings. All i know is that i installed and uninstalled the power kernel twice and always had a lock up within an hour with modrana running with the kernel installed, and have experienced only one or no lock ups (can't remember for one case) with vanilla kernel.

I tried increasing all voltage settings somewhat and still had the problem, so for now i've just reverted to vanilla to test without that extra variable.

It's unfortunate because the ideal settings really helped battery life.

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

Its alway nice to hear that modRana is being actively used! :)

Old-style POI should be automatically imported once modRana the new version of modRana is started, they should be in the "Other" category.
ModRana also won't remove the old POI storage file in /opt/modrana/data/poi/poi.txt, it will just rename it to imported_old_poi.txt.
If you don't find your old POI in the "Other" category, you might want to rename the file back, to initiate a new import on next modRana start.

OK, so let's summarize what we know about the freezing:

• happens with bot modRana 0.16 and 0.17
• on both PR1.2 and PR1.3
• undervolting and over/under clocking might trigger it faster but is not a prerequisite
• its not just a modRana issue as Qlandcarte does something similar, I remember someone also mentioning MAME freezing in the same way
• might be related to using GPS/liblocation as QLandcarte freezes while logging GPS coordinates
• its probably not a GUI toolkit issue as modRana uses GTK but Qlandcarte uses Qt

Its pretty weird as there is IMO a hardware watchdog that should either restart the device or maybe even notify the OS about a non-responsive application.

So, what to do about it ?
There may be something in the modRana stdout log. You can enable it in options->debug->Log modRana stdout to file, new log files will show up in MyDocs/modrana_debug_log/ once activated. Each file represents one modRana run.
The log file is flushed every few seconds, so we may get info about what is happening just prior to the freeze or even after, as the freeze might be just a GUI issue.
BTW, it might be interesting to try to SSH to a frozen N900, this might show us if the device is frozen-solid or just GUI-frozen.

Also, a reproducible way of inducing a freeze may be helpful, to either find the cause or a workaround.

Most probably an exception during download is causing the green "Downloading" not ot load, I'll look into it.

You are right, it's an artifact from the old logging system, it will be removed.

Good find ! Will be fixed in next version :)

Well, yeah, good point. The only issues could be the information widgets as they currently don't handle their own redrawing. But your are right that nothing else actually changes so redrawing every second really isn't necessary.

BTW, skipping the redraw with locked screen/window not visible might be doable as the drawing loop is quite separate and output oriented and should be easy to skip when needed.
There might be some issues though:

• reliable "is window visible detection ?" will be needed
• tiles in the currently visible are wont be downloaded - this might be fixed by just testing which tiles are visible without actually drawing them

I'm going to look into this together backlight control soon.

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

Having updated to the lastest modRana, i experienced a lock up (requiring the battery to be removed) and two spontaneous reboots yesterday while using it. Unfortunately i hadn't yet enabled logging because i wasn't having trouble with vanilla kernel in the previous version.

I have enabled the log file now and will see if i can reproduce the error.