Notices

The Marengo Route Planner at http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/ lets you design your own route. Unfortunately, you have to massage the final GPX file to change the "rte" specs to "trk" and add a <trkseg></trkseg> pair.

-F

Would be nice to take the data from that site, save it into a file and then feed it into http://gnuite.com:8080/cgi-bin/gpx.cgi to get a the Maemo Mapper file needed that could then be saved and upload to maemo mapper. Having the route along with the waypoints is helpful.

These threads are getting a bit long but earlier Gnuite responded to my similar request suggesting that at present smaller sections of the route can be created which are then loaded one after the other. Alternatively the route segments can be edited manually to remove the end/beginning of segments resulting in one route.


It is a bit fiddly but works. I use Google Earth to get the co-ordinates of my POIs and run Gnuite's prog to generate the route segments. I don't bother about the extra POI at the end of segments so I just load them one after the other and save as a single long one. These routes took me through Europe this summer UK-Italy-Hungary-UK.

Kudos to Gnuite, yet again.

I'm not sure if anyone else has encountered this problem: Sometimes during the map download if the internet connection gets interrupted and causes the map file not to load completely. Part of it is still saved in the MaemoMapper file storage directory, thus Mapper thinks it has the map. However, Mapper does not show that particular map file. (I guess that's because it is corrupt and it detects it during loading the map.)

What I end up doing was hooked up 770 to PC and using file manager (maps are saved in MMC card) browsed through all the map files... and deleted the ones that were corrupt/incomplete. After that Mapper did redownload the maps that were missing.

Gnuite: Can you add couple lines of code that checks the file, if it is corrupt or incomplete (or if that is not possible then somehow detect situation in Mapper when it did not load and show a specific map file properly?), and then redownload the map?

There is somewhat similar request over here:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=2899

That might be a good addition as well to force (re)download maps by area, similar to the function already in Mapper download maps by area...

As the corrupted files seem to have a time stamp different from ordinary files,
I use simple find commands (from a linux host) for purging the repository:
It usually works quite well. But of course one should have some assistance from maemo-mapper.

Today have bought Nokia LD-3W. Works well.

Next question - how can I download maps from Google?
This link is not working anymore (tried from laptop's Firefox it - got HTTP/404): http://mt0.google.com/mt?n=404&v=w2.....108180&zoom=2

It looks like that now actual map's URI are: http://kh1.google.com/kh?n=404&v=9&t=trtqttrrqqrssr

How can I download particular area of map?

The "x" and "y" in that link don't refer to latitude and longitude, but rather an alternative coordinate system based on integer "tile numbers." For example, a zoomed-out map of part of South America has x=10, y=15, and zoom=12:

http://mt0.google.com/mt?n=404&v=w2....0&y=15&zoom=12

This URL is for topographical maps. The other URL is for street maps.

Use the "Download by Area" or "Download Along Route" menu items in the "Maps" menu of Maemo Mapper, or use a third-party program.

Thanks a lot, problem solved.

So I downloaded my state (NJ) all even number zoom levels. Granted NJ is a small state, but it took up 446 MB (2.4 GB on disk on NTFS) and on a FAT 32 MMC it's looking like it's going to take about 600 MB (not done copying yet). Has anyone else had the idea to download all the states and torrent them? Obviously it wouldn't fit on a MMC card, but there are laptop hard drives that use little enough power that they can be run off USB alone, or certainly off just a power inverter in the car (or just grab the maps you want for where you're going off your computer).

My completely uneducated guess would say all of the US could be stored on in about 100gb, perhaps less if gnuite was willing to slightly modify the program to allow for dynamic resizing of maps, or perhaps import from say... streets and trips? If M$ can fit all of it's driving data on 1 650 MB CD, maybe there's a way to convert all that into something MM can understand?

just an idea for those of us w/o data on our cell plans... thoughts?

Sure; you could use compressed public-domain vector-based street data, and you could render map images on-the-fly based on the data. And, if you could find enough free data, or if you had a non-trivial chunk of cash to buy it, you could even calculate route directions on-the-fly, automatically adjusting as you drive off course. This is generally what TomTom or expensive in-car navigation systems do.

Unfortunately, it would run slower than molasses on a Nokia 770, or it would look considerably uglier than what Google Maps provides (admit it - TomTom's "maps" are ugly). There is no way that Maemo Mapper could generate images as pretty and readable as those which Google Maps provides without expending an unreasonable (and likely unusable) number of CPU cycles, especially without hardware floating point operations. Hell, even Google Maps admits its complex to generate aesthetically pleasing maps on-the-fly; that's why they pre-render the maps and store the PNGs on network drives. That's what made their web site so much slicker than MapQuest or Expedia. It would be near impossible to provide operation as smooth as Google Maps if you were generating maps on-the-fly from vector data.

Furthermore, the design for a "Vectorized Maemo Mapper" would be so completely different that, if such an effort were engaged upon by some entrepreneurial lads with more time on their hands than I have, I would suggest that it create a product separate from Maemo Mapper, so as not to unnecessarily increase the memory requirements of the application for those who prefer raster maps to vector maps. It could take the form of a #include-controlled separate build, or as a minimal web server that could serve tiles based on vector data.

In any case, I'm happy with raster images and do not have any motivation to sacrifice anti-aliased beauty by trying to modify Maemo Mapper to support vector data. Maemo Mapper is GPL, though, so feel free to contribute if you wish.