Hi Dan.

Getting the player to read the GPS is far from being the main task. (BTW: The Street Atlas CD should be usable once we get a converter written, the specs are available)
The main problems currently are:

1. installation of 3rd party apps on the player


2. a graphical API that works on the player (and is still portable enough to be ported to other Linux systems, from notebook to PDA)


3. an open map storage format that contains enough preprocessed data to make the actual route calculation use less CPU and RAM (both tight resources on the empeg, even tighter on PDAs)


4. the core route calculation algorithm (take a start point, take an end point, calculate shortest/fastest/preferred route).
   
5. the route tracking algorithm (take a route, and start a new route calculation if the driver leaves it, while he is on track: Give instructions to follow it)
   

I am currently working on 1 and 2 with the focus on 1, need help with 2,3,...

Getting real map data to play with is a task that we can tackle when the route calculation algo(s) is/are tested with constructed test sets of data.
If we want to get tricky, we could later implement TMS (traffic messages) into the route tracking and/or calculation, at least for those countries that support it.

cu,
sven