For the record... in order for my script not to crash on rotation, you need to have imagemagick 6.4.2 or newer.

Soon I will be publishing a single repository with composed charts.

So... have there been any new developments with this worthy project?
I'm about 4 hours in to a search looking for a brain dead easy way to load navigational (NOAA raster) charts into a 770 & N800 to use with along with a Bluetooth GPS.

Yup, there have been some developments. Browse to harborfinder.net

I'm slowly processing all 1020+ charts from NOAA and they will all be available soon. harborfinder.net hosts a composite of stitched charts, so some areas (around the edges of charts) may look a little funky depending on the chart. If that area is not to your liking, let me know and I'll fix it. In the next pass of chart processing I'll have a better understanding of bounding polygons around useful areas of a chart.

Here's how to access the data in maemomapper:
Launch maemo mapper on your nokia device, add a new repository (by going to the menu, then maps > manage repositories and clicking New...), give it a name like "NOAA Composite". Change the URL Format to http://www.harborfinder.net/noaa/composed/%d/%d/%d.png. I used the default parameters for the rest of the options.

If that doesn't work, let me know. Note: not all charts are available at this time, so first check harborfinder.net and see if the area you want is available. If not, it will be some time within the next 16 days before your chart is available. Alternatively, you can tell me what region you're in and I can put those charts higher in the queue.

Hey Rob, I'm interested in what you're doing. I have some other trail maps that I'd like to combine and process the same way. I also have some marine charts in NOAA format too for other areas.

I have a few questions:

- Can you provide the tools so I can modify them to work with my own maps?

- Would you be interested in publishing tiles that I create? I don't have a place to post them for Maemo use.

- Are we allowed to use the tiles in harborfinder.net?

- I'm having some problems with it crashing in parts of Alaska. Is there something wrong up there?


What you've done is really excellent. It would be nice for others to be able to create tiles and have a standard place for saving/viewing them. Really nice work.

Hey, that sounds like a great idea, publishing trail maps!
My first reaction though is that I wonder what kind of copyright protection those trail maps have on them (unless of course you authored them).
The original version of the software that processes these maps is attached somewhere above (it's a perl script). I have to dig around for the latest set of perl scripts that generates the tiles and stacks them. I'll have to attach that later as it's not on the machine I'm logged in on. It will definitely require reworking as it assumes that you're reading in NOAA's nautical charts that have a particular format. If you're adept at perl, you can easily rewrite the appropriate subroutines.
I would love to help out, but only if it's legal to do so obviously. If these aren't your trail maps, I'd like to see a license agreement, and if it's from a published book then you'd have to get the publisher's written permission to publicly post this stuff (which is not likely to happen).
Absolutely, that's why I put them there. I know harborfinder.net doesn't exactly tell you how to access those tiles, but you can fetch them yourself by accessing the URL for each tile. That would be super tedious. Sometime soon I hope to make regions of tiles available as downloadable archives, but I'm not there yet.
Interesting... care to mention what part of alaska, lat/lon or city names? I'll take a look. Not sure if this is the case, but it could be an issue with memory management in maemo mapper, and the fact that all of the harborfinder.net tiles are 4-channel pngs, and they still need to be optimized for web distribution (something like a paletted gif with transparency).

Thanks! Again... more work to be done, but your comments help. I'm curious about the problematic region in alaska. There seems to be some bugs in the utility that I use to convert the charts to PNGs, which is why some parts of the Gulf coast have black artifacts (esp. around rotated charts), so I'm currently looking into that.

Again, I'll need to upload my latest set of perl scripts. I'm still in the process of converting this stuff to Java.

Rob

By the way, for trail maps, the OpenStreetMap cycle map might be super helpful. Take a look:
- Go to http://www.openstreetmap.org/
- Click on the little arrow on the far right to show the map layers
- Click on the cycle map tile set
Last time I saw the cycle map it looked pretty good. For some reason this morning it's not showing up for me.

Rob,
I am using an N800. When I setup maemo mapper to use your URL it goes to get the tiles, then at the very end of the download it fails and says it failed to download x number of files. Close. Any thoughts on what I must be doing wrong? I left the parameters other than your URL to the defaults. You don't need imagemagick for anything but running your script to tile your own maps not for using harborfinder.net correct?

Thanks

Hey Mike
THanks for the post. First, no you don't need imagemagick unless you're creating the tiles.
In response to the tiles that fail to download: does it actually download some tiles? I'm wondering if it's downloading all of the tiles over the area that you are viewing, then failing to download tiles for areas that simply don't have NOAA nautical chart coverage. To save space on my web server, I'm not uploading blank images for tiles that don't exist. In fact, I should be doing something more sophisticated where if there is no tile at a location, it will give you back a default "no data for this location" image.
Usually when it claims that it failed to download x number of files, that's okay. It's simply saying that there's no coverage certain areas. So... are you seeing tiles over United States coastline? If so, it's probably working fine.
Thanks,
Rob

Thanks for answering everything Rob. The trail charts I meant were USGS topos so there's no copyright issue just like the NOAA charts. They do show trails in them for hiking and they are a great resource for outdoors maps and inland lakes charts. Along those lines, there are also Army Corps of Engineers IENC's in S-57 format which would require some type of conversion using gdal/ogr, etc.

I'd love to experiment with your perl scripts. I'm rusty in perl but this is interesting enough to get me messing around with it again!

By the way, why are you moving to Java with it?

Finally, I tried really hard to make HarborFinder mess up around Alaska. It's working fine today. That's the way it always goes...

If I find anything reproducible, I'll give specific information about it. Sorry for raising the alarm.

Hey -- well first I'm using Java now because it's pretty easy to change the projection of charts suing the Java Advanced Imaging toolkit. I had to project a lot of the charts around the great lakes from Polyconic to Mercator projection in order to be displayed in Google Maps. Also, converting the tile server to Java would tighten all of the individual pieces a little better. The next step is integrating the processing module with a database engine so that the image processor stops reading/writing to a single flat file for information on all of the charts. That's just a couple reasons.

Actually I didn't think of adding USGS topos, but that is a great idea. Again, I'll post the latest perls up later tonight.

Rob