[Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system - Page 120 - maemo.org

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MartinK	2012-10-10 , 10:14
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1191

Originally Posted by inidrog

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.

While not that straightforward like in Monav, it can already be done through the ~/.modrana/user_config.conf file. Just uncomment the map_config variable and set it to your new map folder path, for example:

Code:

Memory Card/maps/

then you can add your map folders to Memory Card/maps/monav_data/, with the resulting path looking like this:

Code:

Memory Card/maps/monav_data/Norway

Originally Posted by inidrog

Why on the earth isnt ModRana in Extras-Testing?

Rapid development cycle & many people already having Extras-Devel enabled. But yes, good point, I really should push it there already.

The only other issue might be with some Qt dependencies for the QML GUI that I'm not sure are available in Testing & plain Extras. But I'd guess we will see once I push the promotion button.

Originally Posted by pichlo

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.

ModRana works with the concept of device & GUI modules. The device module provide any device/platform specific tweaks (like map storage paths, location access, custom notification handling, etc.) and the contains all the GUI specific bits. Like this modRana can adapt for a platform just loading the appropriate device and GUI modules on startup.

There are multiple device modules (for the N900, N9, Neo FreeRunner, Smart Q7, Android chroot, PC, etc.) and two GUI modules (the classic GTK GUI and the QML one).

The -d option specifies the current device/platform and -u selects the GUI module. But since at least 0.35 modrana should correctly detect the current environment (at least on the N900, N9 and x86/amd_64 based PCs) and select the appropriate modules automagically.

Originally Posted by pichlo

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".

There is also the added benefit of proper rotation support. If you use map rotation with pre-rendered maps, you will quite often get upside down street names.

There are also other benefits - you can generate different map themes form the same data - a night theme, high contrast theme, etc.

Originally Posted by pichlo

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.

I've already sent "Thank you!" postcard.

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...

The "in XX" part (and also the "you should be near the destination" message) are generated by modRana. The rest comes directly from Google and only goes through the substitution rules specified by directions_filter.csv to "unroll" the most common abbreviations.

IIRC:
mod_onlineServices - performs the online route lookup
mod_route - sends the request to onlineServices and handles the result
mod_voice - adds the "in XX" prefix
mod_turnByTurn - handles the turn-by-turn navigation logic & overlay

As Monav returns just the raw route, modRana would need to get a proper turn announcement generator (and turn detector) in the near future.

There are also already translations for the current modRana generated voice command, which are unfortunately not yet integrated in modRana itself.

Originally Posted by pichlo

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.

For continuity purposes - answered in the previous post.

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quixote	2012-10-10 , 16:52
Posts: 41 \| Thanked: 22 times \| Joined on Aug 2010	#1192

Update works beautifully, and a thousand thanks for all the information!

The path wasn't the problem because I figured that was typo and had fixed it manually. But what was causing that constant downloading was this option that you flagged:

go to Options->Network->Network usage and set Network to Don't download map tiles.

I never even looked there. That is what solved the problem.

Thanks again for all your hard work on this!

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quixote	2012-10-10 , 17:01
Posts: 41 \| Thanked: 22 times \| Joined on Aug 2010	#1193

For anyone out there who, like me, has been looking for a good open source map program that also works offline, here's my experiences.

modrana: far and away the best user interface, and now that I can use offline maps, the best thing out there for me.

navit: a very good effort, and if some kind soul comes up with a navit.xml (their config file) that has sensible defaults, it'll be a real runner-up. My problem with it right now is that text sizes have to be set for every zoom level, there's no easy way to guess what zoom level I'm on, so it's a matter of guesswork and trial and error to try to find sensible values. So far, I haven't managed.

monav: an excellent front-end for OpenStreetMaps, very fast. User interface not quite to modrana standards, but okay. Offline maps generated using a vector program which shows real promise, but ... but, but, but, right now it only draws very few of the features so it's functionally useless offline.

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	pichlo	2012-10-11 , 08:33
	Posts: 6,447 \| Thanked: 20,981 times \| Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK	#1194

Originally Posted by MartinK

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.

Yes, I had discovered that too when I was playing around. Setting the espeak parameters manually helped. Of course, having the option in the GUI is much better, thanks for that. The only thing, the espeak help says that the maximul volume is 200; I am not sure how valid settings beyond that are, I have not tested it yet

Unfortunately, it seems that something has broken as a side effect of this change. Leaving the sound settings at "automatic" works fine, but switching to "manual" makes two lots of "edit espeak options" and "reset to defaults" appear and, more importantly, it makes the sound disappear. I can of course leave it at automatic but I was fiddling with the options to try to make it mole legible.

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MartinK	2012-10-11 , 09:11
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1195

Originally Posted by pichlo

Yes, I had discovered that too when I was playing around. Setting the espeak parameters manually helped. Of course, having the option in the GUI is much better, thanks for that. The only thing, the espeak help says that the maximul volume is 200; I am not sure how valid settings beyond that are, I have not tested it yet

I found something related to the volume setting on the speechd mailing list. It concludes that values up to 400 should be safe. But from my experience it seems to be very device dependent - I can use much higher values on my Laptop than on the N900 and still get acceptable output.

Originally Posted by pichlo

Unfortunately, it seems that something has broken as a side effect of this change. Leaving the sound settings at "automatic" works fine, but switching to "manual" makes two lots of "edit espeak options" and "reset to defaults" appear and, more importantly, it makes the sound disappear. I can of course leave it at automatic but I was fiddling with the options to try to make it mole legible.

Thats quite possible, I'll check it out.

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	pichlo	2012-10-12 , 14:38
	Posts: 6,447 \| Thanked: 20,981 times \| Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK	#1196

Originally Posted by MartinK

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.

That's the thing! The blooming TRAC says I must be spam because I did not fill the captcha, but there was no captcha to fill! Neither was there any way of creating an account that I could find. A browser problem? I've tried Firefox on Debian and IE on Windows 7.

Completely unrelated: is there (going to be?) a way of importing POIs from a track? It might be useful in two ways. The obvious one, you walk or drive past something that you later decide to store as a POI. The more advanced, and perhaps not as useful to everyone, there is a tool out there to convert the TomTom POI database to GPX. It would be cool to import that to modRana

It does not look too advanced, just a simple XML to SQLite conversion, so I guess I can do it myself if I have to

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MartinK	2012-10-13 , 16:20
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1197

modRana 0.36.3 has been released

Code:

* fix static-map-url local search not returning any results when using the "geo:" prefix for location coordinates
* fix voice otuput with manual parameters not working

Originally Posted by pichlo

That's the thing! The blooming TRAC says I must be spam because I did not fill the captcha, but there was no captcha to fill! Neither was there any way of creating an account that I could find. A browser problem? I've tried Firefox on Debian and IE on Windows 7.

OK, I'll check it out. There were some changes in the hosting setup, so it might got broken in the process.

Originally Posted by pichlo

Completely unrelated: is there (going to be?) a way of importing POIs from a track? It might be useful in two ways. The obvious one, you walk or drive past something that you later decide to store as a POI.

You mean you would create a very short track and the import it to the POI database ?
As even very short tracklogs can have tens of points & normal ones have hundreds or thousands, you would probably just want to import the first or last point ?

Originally Posted by pichlo

The more advanced, and perhaps not as useful to everyone, there is a tool out there to convert the TomTom POI database to GPX. It would be cool to import that to modRana It does not look too advanced, just a simple XML to SQLite conversion, so I guess I can do it myself if I have to

There are numerous point types in in GPX (trackpoints, waypoints, routepoints,...) - which ones does it use to represent the POI ?

BTW, I was already thinking about adding support for importing POI from files with a CLI parameter. Initially just from simple CSV files, but adding support for GPX files that contain POI should not be that difficult.

It should be also already possible to export the POI database to a CSV file (options->POI->POI storage->Export POI database to CSV), but it seems to be failing for some reason at the moment.

EDIT:
Should be fixed in 0.36.4.

Last edited by MartinK; 2012-10-13 at 16:32.

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MartinK	2012-10-15 , 16:33
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1198

modRana 0.36.6
Turn directions for Monav offline routing results now have proper instructions - eq. turn [slightly/sharply] left/right + U-turns + continue to.

The directions are English-only for the moment, but it should be easy to add support for other languages in the future. I would also like to have a Transifex project for the turn instructions(like Mieru already has), so that everyone can help with the translation easily from the browser.

Roundabouts are not yet handled correctly, but as the Monav client seems to have a working algorithm for roundabout detection, it shouldn't be hard to add.

modRana in Extras-testing
I have promoted modRana 0.36.6 to Extras-testing. Please test & vote so that it can reach the Extras repository soon.

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	Estel	2012-10-19 , 00:27
	Posts: 5,028 \| Thanked: 8,613 times \| Joined on Mar 2011	#1199

While I'm mostly off-line routing "fan" (I don't know, maybe it's this apocalyptic type, that like to have things working without "external" components access, no matter what), I've found that, lately, I'm using ModRana as much as (if not more than) Marble, for my everyday navigation program.

Considering size of team behind Marble, and fact that ModRana is written entirely by you, it's really impressive, at least to me. Hats off, kudos, and really big "thank you" for this awesome piece of software, that is developed and updated in unbelievable pace.

/Estel

// Edit

not to mention, that ModRana affect development of others navigational programs - for example, it's source of my request (to upstream Marble) for streamlining path for Monav off-line routing packs. Impressive, really impressive.

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MartinK	2012-10-19 , 19:43
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#1200

Originally Posted by Estel

// Edit

not to mention, that ModRana affect development of others navigational programs - for example, it's source of my request (to upstream Marble) for streamlining path for Monav off-line routing packs. Impressive, really impressive.

Also Saera is using the modRana command line interface (for amenity search, determining the current coordinates, etc.)

Regarding other upstreamable there is the space-efficient sqlite tile storage and plaintext alarm lists.

IIRC the CloudGPS developer wants to add support for it. And the alarm lists are not yet even implemented in modRana - but that still doesn't prevent others from supporting the concept in their apps.

Last edited by MartinK; 2012-10-19 at 19:46.