In a bit of genius or craziness, I decided to combine two open source programs- our well loved GPSApp with a little program called Roadmap. Roadmap is a cool little program that uses TIGER map data (built into a special format) for displaying maps. After a bit of struggling and applying chewing gum I made them work together. Download it here! See the Installing.empeg file on how to install and download maps etc..
Please note this little hack is in v0.01 and I'm not even sure of it's usefulness yet. It does show maps of roads and such when you drive by however. Comments are appreciated, bugs are expected. (Screenshot attached)

That is so cool. (even though I haven't looked at the actual app yet.)

I was trying to go into that direction myself, but haven't had enough hacking cycles to spend on it.

Me scurries off to ebay to look for a cheap gps reciever.

Anybody know of a good deal on one that will work with the empeg. Preferably one that requires no modification, or at least very little. I'm seeing some Delorme Earth/Tripmates that are pretty cheap, are they any good? Anybody know of anything cheaper?

This is the one i'm going to get, and i think its like $50 new.

Edit, DoH! More like $150+

Hey, you're supposed to be working on a cleaner way to get route directions out of StreetAtlas. Get back to work, you slacker!

(Just kidding of course. This looks like fun!)

(Well, only sort of kidding. I still want easy yet hyper-accurate route directions for GPSapp.)

Ya I know.. but working with open source programs is infinetly more fun than trying to get a closed source program to do what you want.
Besides- I posted onthe street atlas yahoo group and actually got a response from one of SA2003 developers who said he would try to get an export route to file feature implemented in the next version. So time will tell..

Besides- I posted onthe street atlas yahoo group and actually got a response from one of SA2003 developers who said he would try to get an export route to file feature implemented in the next version.

*Boggle*

Oh no, he's boggled again.

Someone call the de-boggler.

Sweetness. It is a shame that roadmap doesn't do street names and addresses though. Actually this screenshot implies that it does know your current location which is all I would really want anyway. Oh, did you mean that it doesn't label all the streets? That would be awfully cluttered on the empeg anyway, but a single line of text telling you your current location would be useful (to me at least).

-Mike

Question on setting up all of those good stuff. I've never setup gps on my empeg before. I downloaded your release, setup everything exactly how your instructions. Hooked up my maybe working gps box, and got nothing. Went through all the setting for GPSapp, and found protocol=earthmate which is what i have. I made the custom cable, swapping pins 2/3 and straight with #5.

But i guess my main question is, do i need to setup mini_ifconfig and gpsd? i noticed in the GPSapp readme, it says very little at the bottom about those. So are the needed?

I wonder if I should post libpopt.a cross-compiled for people. Some of the build for this is a bit weird, but I have a built binary now. No clue yet if it will work, we'll try that shortly.

Oliver, you should probably get the generic GPSapp working before trying this alternate version.

When you say you "get nothing" can you be more specific? What keys are you pressing and what is appearing on the screen?

If it says "waiting for data from GPS receiver", try swapping the TX/RX pins. Also make sure the receiver works of course by plugging it into your PC and seeing if it works with the PC GPS software.

Ya building is a pain...I don't know much about Makefiles I'll learn more and make it easier next release. I forgot that libopt was required too...

It caught me off-guard that "cc" and not "arm-empeg-linux-cc" was being used to compile one library, and so linking gave a segfault. Other than that it was pretty obvious what was going on. I have a binary I just built and a set of maps for PA on the empeg now. I figure I'll shower and go for a ride.

Get a lawnmower that cuts the grass by itself, and suddenly you spend lots of time going other lawn work. Bah. I think I got a mild sunburn.

yea, i think the earthmate is dead. I friend let me use it, a battery leaked acid onto the board before he gave it to me, and i can't even get it to work on pc but i don't really have any software, just some freeware Eartha2NMEA.exe. what i really need to get my hands on is a voltage meter, found a nice website that details a few things to test to make sure the unit works. I think i should just go find a NMEA gps receiver first.

You can open the Earthmate and apply voltage directly to the input pins, FWIW, but yes, I recommend playing with an NMEA model first.

Reading the installation instructions... Is there any way that future versions could a) not need the extra schema files and such, so that installation could be simpler, and b) not need the extraction step, and instead read the contents directly from within each of zipped map files?

b) not need the extraction step, and instead read the contents directly from within each of zipped map files?

Because hey, take the least powerful device you have, and make it do as much work as possible.

LMAO

I lied. My Treo is less powerful. I haven't set up IR yet, so I can't beam the stuff off to it to decompress.

Come on, it can't be that CPU-intensive to extract a single file with a pre-known filename out of a zip, especially when it only has to do it once at the moment when the program loads the map.

I suppose this could be done but I think a clever script that extracts the map files automatically would be better. I want to change the roadmap sources as little as possible to allow for easy upgrades when new versions of it come out. I already need to upgrade the sources to v1.rc1, because v0.15 was the latest I found at the time I started (argh).

But you can't just load a 10MB or larger file into the 16MB of memory on the empeg _and_ have the player and kernel and everything else running at the same time.

And I've had comments about the loading time of the tiny and uncompressed GPSapp route files.

And I've had comments about the loading time of the tiny and uncompressed GPSapp route files.

...not so much the loading as the disk spin-up delay occuring earlier than expected...

But your main point is certainly very valid. File size is an issue.

ISTR at some point you were researching geospatial file indexing schemes. Did anything valuable every come from this? I think that the ideal situation would be to be able to crunch all the data once and repackage it in a GPSapp-optimised filesystem tree which could be tar'd and zipped up for distribution.

My analysis of roadmap code is that it does not load whole county files into memory all the time. It uses memory-mapped files and reads what it needs, and the author already has a geospatial indexing scheme- that's what the 'usdir.rdm' file is for. So we already have a pretty decent indexing scheme going. I also don't think file size should be an issue on the empeg. If ths issue is File size vs CPU then CPU should win over file size every time. The one thing the empeg has going for it is it has more storage space than your typical embedded machine.

Hi Guys,
I just got a NMEA gps receiver from a buddy, I have serialport=/dev/ttyS0 under gpsapp, because i want to test this without having to go out to my car. I don't have notify=1, or anything else like that in my config.ini. The COM port setting for my gps device, are 4800-8-n-1 with Hardware flow control. But gpsapp still just sits waiting for data. I've checked the settings on the gps device, and the NMEA output is on. Any Ideas?

Edit: The Unit is hooked up to the back of the empegs com port, with force ac/dc toggled to dc.

Nevermind, all set.

You have to tell us what it was, now.

You have to tell us what it was, now.

Does the sled's serial port support hardware flow control? I wouldn't suppose it does. That would be my guess.... but what the hell do I know?

It was really nothing, my gps device is also my nextel phone. I switched phones with a buddy of mine who had the i88, and i have the i85. Only difference is GPS. The NMEA output is really gay. Sometimes it will just stop outputting. Even though it has around 8 links which are really good. And i have to go into the menu and turn off the output and then back on to get it to work. I usually have to do this once or twice just to get GPSapp to see the device. I never got the unit to work directly connected to the back of the empeg. Only in the car sled com port, which i have a custom serial cable with 2/3 switched and i think 5 for the ground, whatever the FAQ says. Anyways, this gps device isn't a very good one, because sometimes i will have an accuracy of 500ft and be in the middle of someone’s lawn I've been looking at this one, any ideas if it’s any good? Or if there are any better ones out there without a screen? Is WAAS any good? will it work with the empeg? It kinda says it outputs NMEA