Sound. Specifically when in background mode, although it might also be useful in the foreground. I'm guessing that it should be configurable.

I'd like to suggest 2 different beeps or tones. I'm thinking 1 tone to let you know when you're within 1.5miles of the next waypoint, and 1 to let you know that you've deviated .5 mile off route. I figure that this is going to be most useful for long trips when having gpsapp active for 30 miles of interstate isn't very productive and having the player visible is going to be more useful.

Actually, the option of using short .wav files would be cool. Then I'd have to trawl the web for clips from Knightrider, "Michael, we're going the wrong way."

I like the knightrider sample idea a lot

But gpsapp really isn't running when it is not in the foreground. It would need a separate thread that would keep polling the serial port while the main thread is waiting in the hijack menu.

The audio device is probably not shareable as is without something like Kim Salo's audio overlay hack in hijack, but we need hijack already so we just need to brush up the patch and see whether Mark wouldn't mind adding it. It is probably best to make sure we get it to work before that.

My guess is that playing a tone is about as difficult as playing wav's and with wav's we could even have something like 'left turn coming up in 2 miles'.

An even better solution might be to use a set of prerecorded wavs for turn/distance information and combine those with festival/flite generated streetnames. Ohh, the possibilities.

I've not yet had a chance to try out gpsapp with my Garmin GPS, but I plan to do so soon. (I need to rig up a permanent incar power supply first)

Anyway, here's a similar feature idea to the one you mention...

I'd like to use waypoints to mark places of interest I might encounter as I drive. Examples might be speed cameras, restaurants, service stations, garages, phone boxes, pubs, theme parks, historical sites, car dealers, accident blackspots etc. These could be independent points of interest or associated with a particular route as per the current waypoints.

Each of these could be entered with a number of attributes such as description and, ideally an associated WAV file to play and an image (maybe just a file in empeg .RAW format or whatever) to display as I approach that site. The warning distance could be configurable too, maybe with a number of different WAV's played at specific distances...

I'm envisaging driving along listening to my empeg playing when suddenly GPSAPP chimes, shows a picture of a cheesburger on the display and says 'McDonalds 1 mile ahead'....

A slightly more serious application might be to warn when approaching an accident blackspot (cue skull & crossbones pic) - maybe this could be linked to current speed so that it's possible to play a more urgent WAV if approaching the blackspot at dangerous speed...

In the UK there is a product called Geodesy (www.morpheus.com) that uses GPS technology to warn when approaching speed cameras and blackspots. I don't really want to add yet another display to my car (especially one which is v ugly compared to the empeg), so it strikes me that the same functionality could be built into gpsapp instead. Of course, licensing a database of appropriate locations is another matter entirely....

What do people think?

Interesting idea...Some observations though -

1) We (currently) have no way of writing data to the disk whilst in the car. This is something that we talk about a lot (and not just for GPSapp), yet have not resolved.

2) The Traffic Camera sentry would really only be useful in the UK, and other parts of Europe where they are prominent. Getting a database would be an issue as you have pointed out. In the US, most enforcement is done from patrol cars. Yes, there is a website that attempts to list hotspots that officers prefer, but ISTR that it doesn't have long/lat information, and that some of the entries are rather vague (eg... "Southbound between exits 21 and 13 of I128 from 9-11pm" or "Between the Exxon and McDonalds on Somelittle Road in Somelittle Town"), so is pretty useless.

3) Being able to flag other "places of interest" have been mentioned before. Many of the generic ones appear in various map databases, which again is an issue that still needs to be resolved.

I'm envisaging driving along listening to my empeg playing when suddenly GPSAPP chimes, shows a picture of a cheesburger on the display and says 'McDonalds 1 mile ahead'....

Why not at least plug real food?

Good points!

R/W access really does seem to be a big sticking point for many of the add-on projects discussed here. I'll have a think about that one for a while...

You're really quite fortunate not to be subjected to the proliferation of cameras in the UK; at least there's some scope for reason with a patrolling officer. I think the only reliable option for this would be to pay for access to an existing database, such as the one maintained for Geodesy. I believe this is charged at £10/month, which is quite reasonable for a little piece of mind. However, I've no idea if they would be willing to allow 3rd party products to use that data.

So, the only viable short term option I can see is recording points of interest in car using the GPS directly, then performing some kind of off-line sync. with gpsapp. My Garmin GPS has a 'man over board' function that creates a waypoint with a default name by pressing one of the keys twice. This might just about be workable while driving to record coordinates. Then some kind of PC based utility would be necessary to extract the waypoint data from the GPS unit, add attributes and select WAV & BMP's to go with it, then upload the new list to empeg.


That sounds like a lot of work, but might be good enough for recording POI data for individual use. Recording more than a few waypoints at a time in this manner would get tricky unless the points were named on the GPS as they were defined, otherwise it would be difficult to remember which way points mapped to which POI.

Of course, if R/W access were possible on the empeg no PC software would be necessary (wishful thinking!).

Despite these limitations, adding support for WAV files, perhaps a graphic and speed/proximity thresholds for waypoints would be useful for routes as well as general POI.

I can't imagine the file format to support this type of thing would be hugely complex, so I might think about knocking together a quick windows app to provide a GUI for editing a POI database.

That's why I said 'a picture of a cheeseburger', rather than 'a picture of the food item I get served which bears no relation to the marketing picture displayed on the menu'. :-)

You're really quite fortunate not to be subjected to the proliferation of cameras in the UK


As an expat, I feel your pain. My brother-in-law recently got hit twice in a month by cameras. Not a happy boy. What really pisses me off is the fact that their entire raison d'etre was to prevent accidents in known hotspots, but they have proliferated like un-neutered stray cats into every neighbourhood because of the income they provide to the Government.
Ironically, the only speeding ticket that I ever got was from an officer standing at the side of the road.