Notices

I tried to submit this with the tracker at www.modrana.org, but it didn't work.

The following is still bothering the current Modrana: the centering setting of the map doesn't stay after reboot of the program. If it's set to off in all modes, it will be on when Modrana starts again.

About the conversion tile files -> sqlite database:

FYI I have run this script natively on N900 and it looked as completed right. But now I have found I miss very randomly here and there about 10% of the tiles.

Yeah, the centering on startup is pretty much hardcoded right now. I'll look at it for the next update (so that if it is set to OFF, it won't center at startup and just show the last seen map area).

Do you think this is N900 specific issue (it does work fine on PC ?)?


Oh, any by the way:

Monav routing data packs with whole world coverage (per-country & up-to-date):
http://data.modrana.org/monav/

It was FYI, I have no idea and I find it a bit difficult to debug, redownloading some missing pieces of maps is fortunately not such a burden.

How do I find out if anything is missing? Just browsing the map in modRana? Jankratochvil's post seems to suggest that.

Just FYI, I have now completed the conversion of my 152,127 tiles. I used my ancient Pentium 4 laptop from 2004. I did not copy the tiles, just mounted the N900 and did the conversion there directly. It took about an hour, which seems consistent with beermad's post (200,000 tiles in ~75 minutes). Except that he used a much more powerful machine, suggesting that the CPU power is not the determining factor.

The resulting sqlite files take 444 MB, a bit more than the 407 MB my tiles used to take, but much less than 1.28 GB my tiles used to occupy on the disk, even with the smallest cluster size I managed to get (8 KB). In other words, a huge improvement.

Yes, with "Network: Don't Download Map Tiles" and previously fully downloaded regions I can see the missing tiles.

I've checked the script and was surprised how readable & well documented it is. All seems to be fine & it even correctly handles multiple store databases (needed due to the limited single-file-size on FAT32).

A couple of possibilities what might be causing the missing tiles:

• old tiles - modRana previously didn't check downloaded tiles, so sometimes some tiles might actually have been error pages - but if the tiles were showing fine in offline mode and now aren't, this can't be it
• bug in modRana - modRana fails to load the tiles from the database for some reason
• bug in the import script - I'm not that well versed in perl, so maybe there is still some edge-case that is intermittently triggered

Anyway, I'm currently considering finally adding the tile import functionality to modRana - probably first through the command line interface, followed by support in the GUIs.
The tile storage logic is all there, it just needs to know from where to take the tiles and to which database they should be added.

About the modRana data repository
(http://data.modrana.org/monav/)

First, I would like to thank the Natural Language Processing Centre of the Masaryk University for providing the hosting & computational resources needed to generate the data in the first place. Thanks a lot !

Coverage
The whole world should be covered, 2-3x times. There are data packs for individual countries, continents and for some countries (Germany, France, Canada,...) also for local regions. There are separate car, bike & pedestrian data packs.

BTW, the car routing data size for Europe is about 3 GB, so it should fit on the MyDocs FAT32 partition without issues.

Installing data for modRana
Installation is the same as with previous data packs - they are just in tar.gz, not in zip. The car/bike/pedestrian pack include the shared data structur, just unpack them to the usual /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/monav_data/ directory.

Example (on the N900):

Statistics
Total repository size: 91 GB
Pack count: about 265
Source data downloads: 37.18GB source OSM data in PBF format
Total run length: about 5 hours on a machine with 48 CPU cores (including all stages - download, processing & packaging)

Software
The modRana data repository software, used to generate the repository, is hosted on Github:
https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana-data-repository
If you want to have your own repository, just run repository.py and the repository will be created inside the results directory.

I plan to write a proper post about how the repository software works & I'm also still working on it, mainly on more configuration options & providing better feedback while running a repository update.

Planed features

• repository manifest - so that the repository can be used for downloading data directly from modRana
• *.zsync files for incremental data updates
• regular repository updates - about every 3 days
• maybe also MD5SUMS ?

Quick reply...
Small question, about updating ModRana: why does dpkg complain about not being able to delete non-empty directory "/opt/modrana/modules/googlemaps"?
Best wishes. Thank you.

A quick comment. Yesterday I put modRana to a bit of a test. It was the first time I used it on a motorway. Driving at just about 70 mph (110 km/h), I noticed that it was it was coping well, rotating the maps as it should, but the screen refresh was a bit jerky and there was also a bit of a lag in showing my current position. For example, it showed me crossing under a bridge when I was already a good 50 m behind. Is it related to my recent conversion from tiles to sqlite? I have never tried modRana at anything beyond 30 mph (48 km/h) before so I wouldn't know...

MartinK: would it be possible to include aeronautical charts (as for example http://www.chartbundle.com/charts/) as a map layers option?