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

I'm leaving for State for state of the map Europe (anyone else going ? :) ) on Friday and I'll process all your feedback when I get back on Sunday/Monday. :)

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

I use Modrana not in the least for its tracklogging options.
I cruised Israel by touring car and Modrana was perfectly usable to orientate and make tracklogs to keep a journal to match the photos I shot. In some films I shot I just aimed at my screenie now and then. I'm from the Nether lands so I was positively surprised that it did log the altitudes so well (Dead sea f.i. is 400 meters below sea level).

I like hiking and sailing.
While I use Modrana with Virtual Earth sat map for all navigation purposes I have a bulky Tomtom too. Sometimes in the car I use both:p --> Modrana for the photo-artistic side more or less zoomed out. On my Tomtom I have Offroad navigator installed and that has a function I would much like on Modrana as well: absolute directions for next waypoint. If it could show the angle to the next waypoint you would be able to make accurate decisions at sea (where you not only evaluate the absolute angle, but also stream, wind etc). Cumulus has this option but I much prefer Modrana UI.

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

Hi, Have just come across modrana while trying to find info on rana - looks good so far! Anyway this looks like the place to be for info on modrana. I'm interested on getting modrana working on a PC and was wondering about the state of the gpsd module. I have a working usb gps on my laptop (running kubuntu), but (as with rana) the gps side of things are not working. From a quick look at the gps code eg

def gpsStatus(self):
return(self.socket_cmd("M"))

seems to be using the M command. At http://gpsd.berlios.de/protocol-transition.html it says "The old M command has no equivalent. Mode is reported in the TPV response." So perhaps the gpsd code is out of date, or am I missing something?

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by petur (Post 1049223)

Martin,

just an enhancement idea: right now, maps get downloaded when they need to be displayed (if configured likewise). It would be great to increase the rectangle that triggers a download.

Today I was driving around and modRana was downloading on-the-go. The link wasn't very good so downloads were not very fast, which made some tiles take some time before downloaded.

In this use-case, having the download trigger earlier would cause blue/green tiles never to become visible - ie making sure they are downloaded before they come into view.

I admit this does increase download amounts a bit. Maybe this can be optional or only done for the route ahead (if any).

Quote:

Originally Posted by slender (Post 1049591)

I had this problem especially when I was using in portrait mode and did ~90 turns.

When not routing maybe rectangle area or triangle where the forward area is further away and when routing then rectangle follows current route in advance.

OK, I have summarized this to a feature request ticket. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by skykooler (Post 1050091)

I just had a chance to test it with the new features yesterday. I just got a Bluetooth earpiece, and was using that and ModRana's voive directions to navigate. I now have a new request: If there is going to be a long distance before the next direction, coult it say how far away it is? For example, sayin "Drive 5 km, then turn right on Cherry St."

Quote:

Originally Posted by jj0 (Post 1050679)

I second this, this would be a very useful add-in, often times I take the highway, where only upon inspecting modRana's map, I see that the next turn is in 100km or so, so having it pronounced would be great.

In fact most non-free routing apps do this - say: Take the highway and drive for 100km...

This sound useful & quite easy to implement. What about this:
X - distance to next turn
If the next turn is more than 10 km away, announce at X - 2 km "next turn is in (X-2) km" - no turn description as no one would remember it anyway IMO. Any thoughts on the this & the trigger distances ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by petur (Post 1049842)

Another enhancement idea:

Right now, the location of the current position on the display is selectable (middle or 75% IIRC). For straight roads this works fine, but elsewhere, this could do better.

How about a nifty way to locate the current position such that a maximum of the route ahead is shown on the screen?

Maybe it could select between 5 positions (center + 75% towards each edge) depending on where the route is going...

Good point, ticket added. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by woody14619 (Post 1049579)

On a related note, an option to download all tiles along a freshly computed path would be nice. If I route to an address, good odds I'm going to drive there. And if there's a bad patch of non-coverage along the way, having the tiles pre-downloaded would really be nice. :)

All the parts needed are there... It's effectively a "download along route" for the currently selected route, without the need to save, find, re-load and hit the dozen button combos needed to do it. :)

Well, yeah, you are right, the infrastructure is all there, should be easy to add. :)

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

SotM EU 2011 in Vienna was really nice. :)
I have found about the Kothic Python based offline map renderer that might just work with modRana and also gave an unplanned lightning talk about modRana. :D There was no visualizer, I had no N900 TV-out cable or slides so I just showed an old youtoube video and spoke about what features modRana has. :)

Most of the conference talks are online as slides or recordings, as are many photos on flicker or in my SotMEU2011 gallery. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by 7thd (Post 1051957)

has a function I would much like on Modrana as well: absolute directions for next waypoint. If it could show the angle to the next waypoint you would be able to make accurate decisions at sea (where you not only evaluate the absolute angle, but also stream, wind etc). Cumulus has this option but I much prefer Modrana UI.

Well, I actually needed this when walking form the train station to the conference - I had the conference as a POI, the tiles preloaded, but no roaming so I could not get an online route. :D
I really need to add this soon. :)

@lawabb
I sent you an email regarding this. :)
Basically, support for new GPSD protocol is implemented in V0.26-5+ but I forgot to upgrade the non-Maemo packages on the modRana website.

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by MartinK (Post 1054353)

Ok - but I usually like to know at least the turn direction so I know (for example) which lane to get in, as there may not be time nearer the destination. Perhaps this could be a toggle? Also, I would probably use this a lot in the city, where the distance is a lot less than 10 km - perhaps this can be configurable too?

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

I promised to post some example from tomtom gui so here it goes
http://aijaa.com/v.php?i=000948347385.jpg

1. Animated compass needle showing your current direction in degrees.

2. Graphical sign for next turn & distance to turn

3. The number or name of the road your are turning

4. from top left. Calculated time for routed trip, current time, speed (sometimes in format xx/80 to show limit), total distance to end. On far right are the bars for satellite coverage.

5. Zoom buttons (Far away from each other to minimize occurrence of miss taps of wrong button)

Of course you can just turn on/ off most of these from settings. IMO e.g. white text on blue background really really jumps out from screen. On N900 maybe the best compromise would be to use right or left edge of screen with column of ~200px

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

Martin, quick question (because I'm too lazy to dig through the code right now!):

How hard would it be to allow turn-by-turn routes to be imported from a file? I'd like to be able to use Modrana to navigate bike rides where I take a complicated loop starting and ending at my house. I think I could construct the loop using Google Maps, if there were an easy way to transfer it to the phone and load it into Modrana.

(Mappero has a well-hidden feature where you can ask it to start a route at the end of the previous route, which can be used for the same application, but it's pretty clumsy. I like the idea of doing it on my laptop with a big screen and mouse, and then sending the result off to the phone.)

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

There is a problem with displaying Chinese characters when using POI search:

In map view I centre the view over somewhere in Hong Kong
The using POI online search to search for something (in this case I searched for restaurants)
The list returned will show Chinese characters as a rectangular outline
However clicking on that POI to show details will display the Chinese characters properly
Unfortunately showing the POIs on the map view will again turn the Chinese characters into rectangular outlines

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

Terrific application and amazingly full of features considering how new it is.

As an interim measure until you manage to include a feature to import tile files into the database, I'm writing a Perl script to do the job. I can see from the structure of the SQLite databases that it's designed to have multiple store.sqlite.n files (presumably because otherwise the store could get ridiculously large: it looks like my 200 000 tile files would make for a file of about 2G). What logic do you use to decide when to create a new one? Is it when the last one gets to a certain size threshold?

Once I've incorporated that into my script I'll post it here for anybody who might find it useful. Looks like it's a slow process if you've got a lot of tiles, though; my current test job has been running for about 90 minutes and has only imported 13 000 tiles.