Satnav for non-proprietary maps?
The other day I got to thinking-is there no such thing as a GPS/satnav that can display maps created in an open-source format, such as .pbf? In other words, a format that doesn't have to be reverse engineered? Perhaps an analogy would be an unlocked cellphone-you pay extra for it (or hack it), in exchange for additional flexibility. I wonder if there would be a market for such a thing. Mark
On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 02:47:40PM -0500, Mark Bradley wrote:
The other day I got to thinking-is there no such thing as a GPS/satnav that can display maps created in an open-source format, such as .pbf?
First of all, navigation requires several features: * Map display * Routing graph information * Address index The first part is in my experience best done by maintaining a cache of map tiles in bitmap format on a MicroSD card. If you are moving in a "new" area for which your device is displaying map tiles for the first time, then it will take some time to fetch the vector data and render it into a bitmap. Typically, the device would quickly fetch and display already rendered tiles from the cache. The Mapsforge library works in this way. To my knowledge, Mapsforge supports neither routing nor address search. For those you would need a different type of index. I am not aware of any really good open source offline navigation application for Android. There is OsmAnd, but it consumes a lot of memory, because it does not maintain a cache of map tiles. It is not good at calculating routes, especially for bicycling. It can be interfaced with an external offline router http://brouter.de/ which uses its own file format. Brouter can also be interfaced with the closed-source applications Locus Map and OruxMaps. Both of them are using MapsForge for displaying the maps. As far as I understand, OruxMaps does not support offline address search. I have not tried Locus Map, but OruxMaps seems useable on a low-end device, hardly ever crashing due to running out of memory. It stores tracks and sensor data in SQLite tables on the MicroSD card.
Perhaps an analogy would be an unlocked cellphone-you pay extra for it (or hack it), in exchange for additional flexibility. I wonder if there would be a market for such a thing.
http://linuxg.net/osmscout-is-an-offline-navigation-app-for-ubuntu-touch/ For me, Ubuntu Phone is interesting, but not enough to warrant a purchase. I hope that there will some day be devices that are based on a system-on-chip that is supported by the mainline Linux kernel. With both Android and Ubuntu, my understanding is that upgrading the kernel is practically impossible, because some drivers are tied to a specific kernel version. Marko
I do not own any android devices yet. I fond some of my colleagues are using maps.me application in Apple and andriod phones that make use of the openstreetmap. Ofcourse it's free but updates are some what infrequent. Now last updated ones date some where mid of december last year. It's works fine for the very well developed places. If I am updating openstreetmap I have to wait further. On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 2:13 AM, Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@iki.fi> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 02:47:40PM -0500, Mark Bradley wrote:
The other day I got to thinking-is there no such thing as a GPS/satnav that can display maps created in an open-source format, such as .pbf?
First of all, navigation requires several features:
* Map display * Routing graph information * Address index
The first part is in my experience best done by maintaining a cache of map tiles in bitmap format on a MicroSD card. If you are moving in a "new" area for which your device is displaying map tiles for the first time, then it will take some time to fetch the vector data and render it into a bitmap. Typically, the device would quickly fetch and display already rendered tiles from the cache. The Mapsforge library works in this way.
To my knowledge, Mapsforge supports neither routing nor address search. For those you would need a different type of index.
I am not aware of any really good open source offline navigation application for Android. There is OsmAnd, but it consumes a lot of memory, because it does not maintain a cache of map tiles. It is not good at calculating routes, especially for bicycling. It can be interfaced with an external offline router http://brouter.de/ which uses its own file format.
Brouter can also be interfaced with the closed-source applications Locus Map and OruxMaps. Both of them are using MapsForge for displaying the maps. As far as I understand, OruxMaps does not support offline address search. I have not tried Locus Map, but OruxMaps seems useable on a low-end device, hardly ever crashing due to running out of memory. It stores tracks and sensor data in SQLite tables on the MicroSD card.
Perhaps an analogy would be an unlocked cellphone-you pay extra for it (or
hack it), in exchange for additional flexibility. I wonder if there would be a market for such a thing.
http://linuxg.net/osmscout-is-an-offline-navigation-app-for-ubuntu-touch/
For me, Ubuntu Phone is interesting, but not enough to warrant a purchase. I hope that there will some day be devices that are based on a system-on-chip that is supported by the mainline Linux kernel. With both Android and Ubuntu, my understanding is that upgrading the kernel is practically impossible, because some drivers are tied to a specific kernel version.
Marko
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-- Regards Regunathan Umapathy (Uma) Visit: http://www.panoramio.com/user/69195
participants (3)
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Mark Bradley -
Marko Mäkelä -
Regunathan Umapathy