Greetings,

So after I told myself that I would never hack my RIO again since my last crash, I can no longer resist the urge to get the GPSApp installed.. it's just too cool.

Just wondering though: what does the "maps" feature do (from the README file). Also, is there a way to download general road information for a city, and just display that (even if no route is selected).

Thanks
-Ted

GPSApp will show you a "map" of a route you load from the maps on us website and it will show a track of where you've been. So you really aren't downloading a map persay, but a track of where you are supposed to go to get from one place to another. There is no way to download general road information, unless you fiqure out a way to make Maps on Us generate a route that hits every road in your city (impossible unless you live in a very small town).

It would be fun if GPSApp could be extended to display some additional vector lines surrounding the programmed route. Not an entire map of the region, just the lines representing the streets within a mile or so of the preprogrammed route. So that way, if you get off-course, you can see what streets to take to get you back on course.

I know MapsOnUs doesn't supply that information. But wouldn't it be cool if we could get like a Tiger dataset (or something similar), and have either the Python script on the PC or GPSapp itself on the player match up the Tiger data and the MapsOnUs route, and overlay them atop each other.

Agreed.. I would use routes, as much as I would like to know what streets are coming up.

What we'd need is a way to map long/lat into streets for a city. Has anyone taken a look at microsoft's terraserver? I think they leave it open to queries, so maybe something can be written to retreive the data?

http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/about.aspx?n=AboutTerraServiceAPI

-ted

geocoder from
server:anonymous@cvs.ofb.net:/ofb/cvs
will do what you want with data you can already download in bulk.

But wouldn't it be cool if we could get like a Tiger dataset (or something similar), and have either the Python script on the PC or GPSapp itself on the player match up the Tiger data and the MapsOnUs route, and overlay them atop each other.

So cool that we already talked about it.

Ok, I'm kinda new to the area of mapping and there's a few things I don't really understand.

1) What's Tiger data? (I've heard talk of it before but don't know what it is)
2) Geocoder? I googled and it looks like it gets lat & long for an addr (or did I find the wrong thing?)

As far as providing GPSapp with the data it needs to display vector-based maps, can't we already do that with USGS data?

Tiger data is the Census data. USGS DLGs and Tiger vector data are equivalent for the ppurpose of providing base data for vector maps. However the point of geocoder is to be able to search out a place instead of using e.g. terraserver to do it.

The most recent Tiger data is at:
http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2002/

Tiger data is US taxpayer-funded data, containing information such as land-use, census figures, school districts, etc., that is useful to Goverment entities. Take a look at http://tiger.census.gov/

Ok, so at a quick glance, it looks like Tiger data isn't available for download. But DLGs are so why can't we use those?

I realize we couldn't locate an address, but we could at least show the driver how to get to a highway or that they're on a dead-end street.

Err.... it is. The most effective way to try and get it is probably wget (assuming you have something that'll run wget) to try and mirror the directory. I found that connection issues meant that I had to rerun the wget a couple of times to get everything. Be warned that you don't want to do this with a 56k modem, only with broadband access. It's 3.6GB

it looks like Tiger data isn't available for download.

Even if it went away from the Census site tonight I know of at least 3 other archives of it, besides mine.

The most recent Tiger data is at

Hey, the 02 data is out! Have you had a chance to do anything with it? I am curious if it fixes any of the problems from the 2000 data set that was the most recent available when we talked about this previously (and which Kim Salo's software was using) such as lack of one-way info, etc.

-Mike

Nothing particularly indicated they went back and took care of the one way problem. I have a list of format changes somewhere (it's on the site).

And you should really stop rubbing the salt in the wounds about having Kim's software.

Has anyone looked at
http://www.gnu.org/directory/gpsdrive.html

and the possibilty of porting?

it's certainly beyond me...
-t

I found an interesting website:
http://www.ertico.com/links/gdf/gdf.htm

Here you find the specifications on the GDF map data format which is used by Teleatlas together with some sample files and explanations.

Additionally I found a Linux project on car navigation and some interesting links on this site:
http://www.geocities.com/linuxcar/GPS_car_Nav_EN.html

Probably some code of this project can be reused for the gpsapp.

Juergen

GPSdrive certainly looks polished for desktop use. But it still relies on internet-based mapping.

For desktop use, I use xastir. Looks good, works well, I can use aerial photos, topos, shapefiles, whatever, and it's all good.

And you should really stop rubbing the salt in the wounds about having Kim's software.

Sorry. If it makes you feel better I no longer have his software on my empeg, but I do use GPSApp. There is something to be said for using software that is actively being developed. Not that GPSApp has seen many improvements in the last month or so, hint, hint, hint.

-Mike

I did a little, but the time I had yesterday (well, not really) went into the EQ setting stuff. Hopefully tonight I'll figure out the tuner stuff.

It would really be great if gpsapp could use the gdf format, because you can buy a CD of your region. The tiger maps are US only, and Teleatlas is also available for europe.

It would really be great if gpsapp could use the gdf format, because you can buy a CD of your region.

Yeah. Someone please remind me...

What's stopping us from taking an existing map CD in a proprietary format (something you'd pay money for and purchase) and then reverse-engineering its format for use with the car player? Why does the data have to be in a "free" format? I know I'd pay good money to get better maps than MapsOnUs can provide.

Surely others have already reverse-engineered these map discs?

The right answer is an interchange format like shapefile, but I can't comment on how far Jan has gotten with his testing or whether he was using python.

My opinion is gpsapp should support an interchange format, and someone else gets to write the gdf to interchange format translator. I think shapefile, the de fecto vector standard of the GIS world, should be that format, but to be honest I haven't ochecked to see if things like street direction can be represented. Perhaps I should.

Someone want to write a gdf parser?

Perhaps. I can tell you I have no interest in doing it. Doing the autorouting with some form of vector data that's readily available is interesting. I have free vector data. Someone who cares could perhaps arrange to translate proprietary format data into a common free format.

I'd pay to get such data, sure, but I have no interest in developing for it. In fact it's not even interesting until we have a way to deal with any data, why try to do 2 hard things all at the same time (get right rendering of a map and routing on it, *and* using a proprietary format)?

Fossi posted:

In reply to:

---

found an interesting website:
http://www.ertico.com/links/gdf/gdf.htm

Here you find the specifications on the GDF map data format which is used by Teleatlas together with some sample files and explanations.

---

If I understand that correctly, Teleatlas uses the gdf format and the specifications of that format are available at the website linked above. Why can't we use this data? AFAIK Teleatlas provides the most accurate map data...

Hey, what about this?

http://www.gpsu.co.uk/features.html

From what I can tell (not sure I understand the text completely), this thing will import/export in Garmin, Magellan, MapBlast, and a bunch of other formats. I dunno exactly what it does or how it works...

Data exists in other formats. Do you know of translators from shapefile to GDF, at least? Forcing data to be purchased in order for development to get done isn't a good way to have any development get done.

Basically you need to find someone interested in writing a GDF to something translator, or a something to GDF translator. I have no interest in doing either of those things.

Needing to convert the data offline (I don't do Windows) isn't really that exciting either. If the "Garmin, Magellan, " comments mean downloading and uploading lists of waypoints or a track log, it's not that exciting period.

And incidentally here's the answer about MapBlast:
http://www.gpsy.com/tutorials/mapblast.html

As of 99/7/5 the MapBlast site no longer offers GPS directions due to a contractual change with their data provider.

Yeah, I was wondering about MapBlast. That's the second time I've seen something on the web that seemed to hint that I could use MapBlast to download a binary file of the driving directions themselves, yet I could never find a link to do that on their site.