[Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system - Page 119 - maemo.org

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jankratochvil	2012-10-09 , 16:13
Posts: 13 \| Thanked: 26 times \| Joined on Sep 2012	#1181

Modrana will just use its standard paths where will be no files so Modrana will reinitialize from scratch, like on a newly bought N900.

Code:

ssh user@nokia900
$ mv ~user/.modrana{,-orig}
$ mv ~user/MyDocs/.maps{,-orig}

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	inidrog	2012-10-09 , 18:49
	Posts: 266 \| Thanked: 89 times \| Joined on Jan 2010 @ Norway	#1182

Far as I can see in the MoNav client there is an option to choose a Data Directory and Load map data eg. Memory Card/MoNav_maps/Norway

Please implement this.

Why on the earth isnt ModRana in Extras-Testing?

Edit:
http://wiki.maemo.org/ModRana_offline_routing_guide

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Last edited by inidrog; 2012-10-09 at 19:04. Reason: brain

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quixote	2012-10-09 , 19:26
Posts: 41 \| Thanked: 22 times \| Joined on Aug 2010	#1183

jankratochvil: I'm not having any trouble running modrana. I want it to use downloaded tiles instead of always refusing to show a map unless it has a connection. (I do field work, and there's often no signal, but it would still be nice to have a map on my n900.) So I don't really need to re-initialize, do I?

What I want to do is see maps when there's no connection. (p118 has details on the error messages I get.)

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	pichlo	2012-10-09 , 23:15
	Posts: 6,447 \| Thanked: 20,981 times \| Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK	#1184

Originally Posted by quixote

I'm trying it right now on my pc with this command: python modrana.py -u GTK -d pc (On both pc and n900, it insists on trying to download.)

I have always used the GUI to start the app, both on the N900 and on the PC. So I don't know what those command-line arguments mean. Neither am I very versed in Python. So what I say may be a complete bull****. But the code in your post #1177 looks to me like getting the GPS coordinates failed because GPSD, whatever that is (a GPS deamon?) isn't connected. As a wild guess, couldn't your problem be caused by having Network positioning enabled in global Location settings?

Let me run a quick test... exit modRana; go to System->Settings->Location; enable Network positioning; switch to offline mode; start modRana... Hmm, inconclusive. I got "Failed to download" tiles for a second, but very quickly replaced with stored tiles. I also got a GPS fix around the same time, quite likely because I haven't moved. Perhaps worth trying driving a few km before the last step.

When you are connected, do you get a map right away or do you get green tiles with "Downloading..." printed across them for a while?

EDIT:
Please disregard my rant above. MartinK posted the correct answer in post #1190. I would delete this post if there was such an option.

Last edited by pichlo; 2012-10-10 at 10:02.

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	pichlo	2012-10-09 , 23:51
	Posts: 6,447 \| Thanked: 20,981 times \| Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK	#1185

Originally Posted by jankratochvil

Originally Posted by pichlo
7. If the app used vector graphic and pre-recorded voices, then I believe it would be ready for commercial release!

This is exactly why I rather paid for better Modrana as compared to the commercial offerings it features detailed maps and it can also read the names of streets.

Vector maps can be just as detailed with the added advantage of being scalable. You could have a single file covering a whole country or even a continent rather than millions of tiles, many of them missing. Street names may be more useful (and intelligible!) in Czech Republic (I know, I come from Slovakia originally

), but here in the UK the situation is a bit different. Street names are often obscured and rarely shown other than at the beginning and the end. If you join the street in the middle, you have no idea what the name is. "Turn left" is much more useful than "turn to Oxford Road", even if it sounded like "Oxford Road" and not "Khrookhfd Road".

Please don't get me wrong, I love the product and yes, I have put my money where my mouth is, even though only a small amount for now. It far exceeds any other offering currently available for this platform. But it has a lot of potential it has not quite realized yet.

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	pichlo	2012-10-10 , 00:37
	Posts: 6,447 \| Thanked: 20,981 times \| Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK	#1186

I found a new feature. When I scroll the map to a missing tile in offline mode, the tile will not be downloaded even if I connect to the internet unless I close and re-open the program.

Question: where are navigation messages stored? I mean things like "in xx miles turn to..."
I grepped through the /opt/modrana tree but could not find them...

Question 2: how can I take this offline? There must be a better place than this forum. I tried the ticket wiki but it thought I was a spam.

Last edited by pichlo; 2012-10-10 at 00:39.

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Wikiwide	2012-10-10 , 05:19
Posts: 1,994 \| Thanked: 3,342 times \| Joined on Jun 2010 @ N900: Battery low. N950: torx 4 re-used once and fine; SIM port torn apart	#1187

Quick reply...

Originally Posted by pichlo

Question: where are navigation messages stored? I mean things like "in xx miles turn to..."
I grepped through the /opt/modrana tree but could not find them...

I don't remember very well, but it seems to me that these messages are stored inside the python file (maybe, "mod_route.py") which creates the route. This 'hard-coding' is one of the reasons they are always in English, and not any other language. I may be mistaken, of course.
Best wishes.

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MartinK	2012-10-10 , 08:22
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1188

modRana V0.36.2 has been released !

Changelog:

Code:

* it is now possible to set Espaek volume .1
 * can be set up to about 10x higher than the default value
 * higher values might cause some distortion
* improved offline routing turn detection .1
* it is now possible to download tiles around current route .1
* better feedback for download around track .1
* when imperial units are used, yards now serve as the default small unit .1
 * yards/feet can be switched in Options
* fix wrong batch download storage path .1
* general fixes and code cleanup .1
* fix recurring (harmless) error message if using GPSD & GPSD itself is not running .2

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modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
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MartinK	2012-10-10 , 09:06
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1189

Originally Posted by pichlo

1. I could not get "download tiles along route" to work. All I get is the two preloaded examples. Am I missing a step there? I suspect a user error not a software bug.

Well, this was caused by a wrong naming choice - "route" in this context meant "along one of the saved GPX tracklogs". But I've done a slight overhaul in 0.36, so now "route" really means the currently active route and "around track" now has the old functionality.

Originally Posted by pichlo

2. The voice guidance is too quiet in a car, but I doubt modRana can do anything about that.

Well, it looks like it can.

I've checked out eSpeaks command line options - it looks like the volume/amplitude can be set using the -a parameter. I've incorporated this functionality in 0.36 and added an option for setting volume to Options->Sound->Voice. The only downside is, that at very high volume, the output becomes a bit distorted.

Originally Posted by pichlo

3. For navigation in imperial units, yards are more customary (and intuitive) than feet. "Turn left after 100 yards" is more common than "turn left after 300 feet". OTOH, yards are never used for vertical distances, only feet. Strage system, I know

OK, I've switched to yards by default for small imperial units & added a yard/feet switch to Options->View->Units.

Originally Posted by pichlo

4. I think there is a missing slash somewhere in the PC version. I used it to batch download a lot of tiles and it stored them in ~/.modrana/mapsOpenStreetMap, not ~/.maps/OpenStreetMap. I may look through the scripts to see if I can find it, though I am far from a Python expert.

Yeah, you were right !

There was one old manual concatenation (not using the proper os.path.join()) in the batch download module (mod_mapData). Should be fixed in 0.36.

Originally Posted by pichlo

5. Is there an option and if not, how difficult would it be to add, to restrict which zoom levels to use? Not just min and max, but for example only even layers, to save space.

That shouldn't be that difficult to implement, the only issue is, that different map layers have different zoomlevel ranges. So you would either need a global setting with toggle for say 1-21 or/plus a per layer setting for toggling the individual zoomlevels on/off. "Even/Odd zoomlevels only" would work universally though.

Originally Posted by pichlo

6. It would be nice if the app had its own help. Somewhere where the about info is. Not essential, only nice.

Well, yeah - I think I should at least include a link for the website & this thread for start.

Regarding in-application help, there are basically two issue

Rendering long pieces of text in a meaningful way. The classic GTK GUI is custom made in a fullscreen Cairo Widget and doesn't use any other GTK widgets other than dialogs at the moment. So the help text would either need to be paginated or a GTK widget would need to be use somehow (replacing the current widget temporarily or running in a dialog ?).

And there is not that much of "help" content even on the project website to begin with. Most of the modRana knowledge is probably located in this very thread.

This is a standard issue for OSS projects - if you are writing manuals, you are not adding features & fixing bugs.

Originally Posted by pichlo

7. If the app used vector graphic and pre-recorded voices, then I believe it would be ready for commercial release!

Well, the Marble project recently gathered navigation voice samples in multiple languages. As they are licensed CC-By-SA 3.0, it should not be problem to use them in modRana in the future.

Regarding vector map rendering, the most promising project from modRanas point of view is called Kothic. It is a realtime map renderer written in Python. It looks really interesting, but I haven't yet got to installing it and checking out how well it works. The output looks very nice though.

There are of course also other renderers such as the one inside Navit or Monav - but to my knowledge, non of those has any interface, that would make it usable from third-party applications.

And there is also still the old renderer from Rana in /opt/modrana/modules/pyrender/. This is how it's output looked like. I've tried to get it to work after I've forked Rana in early 2010 but have just disabled it in the end.

Originally Posted by pichlo

BTW I tried raising a ticket about #3 but the wiki did not like me. Again, I suspect the problem between my keyboard and my chair.

I've had serious automated spam issues on the modRana TRAC instance, so this is why the (maybe a bit too strong) checks are in place. I think that if you register an account and/or fill in the chaptcha, it should let you in.

Or you can just use the modRana issue tracker on Github - I check out both.

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MartinK	2012-10-10 , 09:35
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1190

Originally Posted by Estel

Is there any possibility to share Monav offline navigation data, between ModRana and other programs, like Marble? I mean, is path for monav packs configurable, or hard-coded (in the latter case, it would be only possible to achieve desired effect via symlinks, aka not in vfat MyDocs)?

/Estel

The Monav data are stored in /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/monav_data/ for exactly this reason.

It even keeps the master_folder/subfolder Monav data package structure, so it should also be theoretically directly usable by Monav (once you select the appropriate directory).

Marble stores its Monav routing data in /home/user/MyDocs/.local/share/marble/maps/earth/monav/[mode/][continent/][country/]. As it uses a custom profile folder prefix, I don't thing they plan to share the data.

Originally Posted by quixote

I'm trying it right now on my pc with this command: python modrana.py -u GTK -d pc (On both pc and n900, it insists on trying to download.)

On the N900, you should run it with:

Code:

python modrana.py -u GTK -d n900

Or else you won't get location and other platform specific tweaks.

Originally Posted by quixote

With wifi turned off, the terminal shows at least a couple of things that look problematic, but I don't know enough to have a clue:

Code:

@ location: using GPSD 

location: starting GPSD 1 second timer
location: enabling location
('location GPSD: connecting to GPSD failed', error(111, 'Connection refused'))

TypeError: update() takes exactly 1 argument (2 given)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "modules/mod_cron.py", line 84, in _doTimeout
    if callback(*args) == False:
  File "modules/mod_location/mod_location.py", line 75, in _screenUpdateCB
    self.provider._updateGPSD()
  File "modules/mod_location/gps_daemon.py", line 50, in _updateGPSD
    if self.connected:
AttributeError: GPSD instance has no attribute 'connected'

That's just an unrelated & harmless error message caused by the GPS daemon (GPSD) not running. It should not show up anymore since 0.36.2.

Originally Posted by quixote

It also complains quite a bit about "icons: not found" but they seem to show up just fine, so that's probably nothing.

Also harmless. There is a button somewhere in modRana, that has an empty string for icon name - have not yet been able to find it.

Originally Posted by quixote

The display itself, both on pc and when I run it on n900, has a repeated message about "tile failed to download, network error ... check connection, use different map layer, ...". I went back to using OSM Mapnik, since that's supposed to work.

As 0.36 fixes batch download related bug, that cased the tiles to be saved to a wrong path, please update and check if it fixes your issue.

Also, to disable automatic tile download (indicated by those Downloading... map tiles shown when you enter a new map area) go to Options->Network->Network usage and set Network to Don't download map tiles. Like this modRana will not download any map tiles, unless explicitly through the batch download menu.

Originally Posted by jankratochvil

This is exactly why I rather paid for better Modrana as compared to the commercial offerings it features detailed maps and it can also read the names of streets.

Yep, you can do more than just render the map when you have the underlying vector data - like checking on which street you are or pinning the position indicator to the current road in the turn-by-turn mode.

Even though it doesn't support vector map rendering just yet, modRana already has a broad range of donation options.