Hi:

I love and use Maemo Mapper on my N800.

Being a boater I'd like to see a nautical chart capability for Mapper.

NOAA publishes Electronic Navigation Charts (ENC's) which are free downloads. More info at: http://chartmaker.noaa.gov/mcd/enc/index.htm There are links to free ENC viewers in the "resources" section of the web page.

On my Mac I use Mac ENC. It enables GPS usage with ENC charts. http://www.gpsnavx.com/MacENC/index.php?page=Home

Bob

I have an old iQue 3600 with Garmin's nautical charts that I use underway, but it'd be really nice to be able to have everything in one package (and have it more up-to-date and free than the Garmin stuff).

There is an online chart viewer at: http://ocsdata.ncd.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/

It sort of works with the N800 through Opera. Don't see how you could connect it up to a GPS, and you would require an internet connection.

Bob

I'm guessing that incorporating ENC charts would be a lot of work on the part of the maemo mapper developer because they are vector-based, not raster based. That is, the ENC chart is really just a very complicated list of coordinates. AFAIK, the maps that maemo mapper currently support are all basically regular images with positioning information included to tell you how to piece them together.

To support ENC charts, mapper would have to parse out the file and actually draw everything on the screen. I'm a programmer with a software company that sells hydrographic survey and dredge software so I've wrangled with ENC charts--not a heck of a lot of fun...

A more likely solution would be conversion of ENC charts to pngs at various resolutions in the directory structure mapper supports.

would be cool though.

They do have raster based charts as well: http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/Index.htm

But any given spot on the earth is covered by multiple charts at various scales.

Something like the runwayfinder repository would be ideal: http://www.runwayfinder.com/charts/x%25dy%25dz%25d.jpg


Bob

Has there been any luck with this?

I came across this page hoping to get the ENC raster images into Maemo Mapper on my n810.

Something tells me it isn't as simple as taking rasters, assigning zoom levels to them and giving them 2 corners (lat/long of northwest corner, lat/long of southeast corner) but it seems like it ought to be that simple. Can anyone explain how far off I am and if there are any resources for how to create a new map repository?

Alright... after much number grinding and batch image processing, I've built my own maemo mapper repository for narragansett bay in Rhode Island using the rasterized ENC images from NOAA. After this weekend I'll hopefully come up with a automated way to bring in NOAA charts at various zoom levels -- always preferring the highest detailed map at a point (hopefully). At this point, the Naragansett Bay overview chart is available only at the zoom level of 6 (in maemo mapper terms, zoom level 15 in OSM terms).

I'm going to try this with GPS on the boat tomorrow! To take a look at the map create a new repository with the address:
http://www.robgfx.com/noaa/%0d/%d/%d.png
Download Zoom steps 2/4
View Zoom Steps 1/4, next able
Downloadable Zooms: Min 4, Max 20

These are basically the default settings. Note.. the map will only show up at zoom levels 1-6 (native zoom level is 6).

Hopefully this weekend I'll write a how to explaining what I did, then start a batch process to incorporate more maps.

By the way -- for those who don't know the area, just go to this lat/lon to see the maps: Newport, RI is at 41.48051,-71.30823

okay so I wrote a perl script that will take downloaded BSB files from the NOAA RNC repository and scale/rotate/cut the charts into well placed slippy map tiles at 6 zoom levels. So let's say you download chart 13228. Running the script will produce a directory named 13228, that has subdirectories named for those 6 zoom levels (say .. 14,13,12,11,10,9) and subdirectories contained therein for columns of tiles and then all the appropriate tile images.

I downloaded all of the charts for Massachusetts and Rhode Island and was able to batch process them in 6 hours. This will produce one maemo-mapper style repository per chart (since these charts can overlap and there's no automatic way to know which chart a user wants to see since some are overviews and others are harbor detail maps -- there are things we can do to fix this, but since all charts say which number to look at for the adjacent chart, it shouldn't be that hard to switch repositories manually). It would be nice if there was a way to copy all of the repositories to your N8x0 so that you don't have to be connected to the internet while on your boat.

This script may only work for stuff in the western half of the northern hemisphere.

Steps to get a NOAA chart into maemo map:
1.) Download/install the latest version of ImageMagick so that the 'convert' binary is in your search path
2.) Download libbsb so that the 'bsb2png' binary is in your search path
3.) Make sure you have perl installed. If it's not installed at /usr/bin/perl, you'll need to call the perl script with $PERL_HOME/perl ./generateOSMTiles.pl
4.) Download the generateOSMTiles.pl.txt script attached here (and rename it to generateOSMTiles.pl .. I had to add the txt ending so that I could attach it)
5.) Download a RNC chart from NOAA (google search for NOAA RNC charts) and unzip them to a folder somewhere (let's say you extract the zip file to a directory $RNC_HOME...)
6.) Assuming that you downloaded chart 13228, then run generateOSMTiles.pl with the command:

7.) Get access to a webserver, and upload the entire directory whose name is the chart number (assume here you uploaded to www.myweb.com/13228
8.) Launch maemo mapper on your nokia, add a new repository (by going to the menu, then maps > manage repositories and clicking New...), give it a name like "NOAA 13228". Change the URL Format to http://www.myweb.com/13228/%d/%d/%d.png. I used the default parameters for the rest of the options.

--Rob

Er, it looks like you forgot to attach the perl script..

My bad! I didn't realize it didn't upload because .pl is not an acceptable extension by vBulletin. I added a .txt extension but now you have to rename it to just generateOSMTiles.pl after you download it.

Thanks
Rob