Just wanted to know if you have gotten any further on your GPS project.
I'm thinking if buying myself a GPS, and I wonder; How are you storing all of those coordinates found in all of those maps available??? Do you just upload a map you like onto the Empeg's disk and use it of from there.

The system I've been building differs quite a lot from any other GPS software I've seen. As I'm not relying on any pre-defined data, all maps (mainly the areas where I drive) have been first scanned to bitmap images and then uploaded to empeg (takes over 200MB). Then, with the Palm interface, I've marked points from map, so that I can get geographical positions which correspond to specific coordinates in the bitmap. This way, using linear interpolation along the closest points, the current position can be calculated. And to answer to your question, the coordinates have been beamed from Palm through IrDA to empeg, which saves them to a scratch partition (always rw mounted).

Do you use the 'free-maps' found around on the internet?? (Like www.gpss.co.uk)

No. Basically, the maps I've seen so far are way too inaccurate (atleast in Finland). The scanned maps I use are in scale of 1:20 000, which gives quite nice accuracy, so that you actually can do street-level navigation. There are couple of companies selling good digitized maps but the prices are enormous, between $1500 to $20000. Though, the digitized maps contain a lot more than just the maps in bitmap format. They provide maps in vector-format plus information like which way you can drive a specific street. Given all that information, it would be possible to do a fully automatic navigation system which tells you where you have to turn in order to go to the target point. So far, I'm missing that information and have to do the navigation manually.

Will it be possible to have a copy of your program to put on my Empeg????

The system is currently heavily under development, and as it is, it requires kernel modifications to the IrDA stack, specific scratch parititions to be available, etc. But we'll see on the future, how the project goes and so for.

Though, what I could consider at some point is to get some pictures and put them somewhere available.

Kim