GPSApp+Roadmap minor update

I've just updated GPSApp+Roadmap with vfdlib v4 thus adding support for the v3 Alpha player. I've also added a menu option in GPSApp to toggle Roadmap on and off. This is useful if you actually want to see your route in GPSApp uncluttered by roads. I have committed myself to figuring out these coordinate projection issues so that GPSApp routes and Roadmap roads can match at some point, but I'm not the best at math...
Download it here and pray...

BTW if anyone is interested I finally got a cygwin->Empeg cross-compiler working. I know some people have posted one before, but in when I tried it, it made i386 binaries, this one actually works more or less. If anyone wants me to post it somewhere let me know.

Cool, roadmap is lots of fun. I'm really looking forward to someone figuring out how to make the maps and the position match up, as now it always looks a little funny as the arrow traces around slightly off the road.

Matthew

Yeah, i gotta say, it's a very impressive piece of software. I'd never seen it in action until the Berkeley mini-meet recently, and i'm convinced that if everyone actually saw how advanced it actually is, way more people would be using it. If only we could get a good set of map data to store on the empeg!!!!!

If only you knew. We saw GPSApp at the meet. GPSApp+Roadmap does everything GPSApp does, and has an overlay of all of the surrounding streets that's zoomable from verry small to very big. I would have shown it off, but somewhere in my config I've broken things so that gpsapp doesn't run and when I turn my GPS on my player goes into freakout stop-pressing-so-many-buttons mode when the gps starts sending packets.

While you've got your dash open for your install, you should definitly throw a GPS in there, or at least a power/serial lead out so that you can plug one in later.

Matthew

Yeah, roadmapgps got me to the NJ meet when I discovered (en-route) that the mapsonus route had a big straight line between the NJTP and the destination, with no attempt to actually follow existing roads. There I was, flying down the pike and all of a sudden.. WTF? Fortunately I was able to dead reckon my way there by following roadmapgps lines in the general direction.

BTW, that co-ordinate 'mismatch' appears to be an order or 2 of magnitude error in the zoom level being displayed.

You know... i think i will... what was the source for those cheapy GS recievers?

You mean bgmicro.com?

yeah, but you need to build an rs323 interface for it (the svee-cm3 or something like that). my gps is tucked in til i figure out how.

foxtrot_xray's VFD interface board is a RS232 <-> TTL board so you can just use that. You'll still want to wire in the backup battery tho to save you downloading the almanac each time you power up.

The way i handle the rs232-ttl conversion is with this little thing. Just strip the wires on it and connect it to the right wires on your GPS and your done. Hard pressed to beat the price even if you made one yourself too.

You mean bgmicro.com?

try as i might i can't find any on that site. =]

part number used to be ACS1394. probably discontinued.

but somewhere in my config I've broken things so that gpsapp doesn't run and when I turn my GPS on my player goes into freakout stop-pressing-so-many-buttons mode when the gps starts sending packets.

If I recall correctly, you didn't do anything, hijack changed an option. Go to DC mode and change the "serial port behavior" option in Hijack's main menu. I think you are supposed to change it from "player uses serial port" to "apps use serial port". Or something like that.

Oh cool. I was hoping it would be something simple. I'll check this out the next time I'm in my car. I still have to figure out a good place to mount my GPS, as while geeks are impressed by a palm pilot GPS with CAT5 tied to it with cable ties, normal people find it kind of, well, geeky.

Once GPSApp gets dynamic routing, we're going to have to investigate some way of hooking up a compass and the spedometer so it can do dead reckoning like a real navigation system. Considering that NMEA is a boat thing where compases are important, and there are GPSes with compasses built in, are there ones that send the compas heading over NMEA?

Matthew

I still have to figure out a good place to mount my GPS, as while geeks are impressed by a palm pilot GPS with CAT5 tied to it with cable ties, normal people find it kind of, well, geekly.

I completely dismantled my GPS so that it was just the bare circuit board and the antenna, and tucked it into free cavities somewhere within the recesses of my dash. The antenna is mounted just above the heater vents, invisible beneath the plastic of the dash, but still high enough (and far forward enough, i.e., under the windshield so it can see enough of the sky) for it to get decent reception.

The way i handle the rs232-ttl conversion is with this little thing. Just strip the wires on it and connect it to the right wires on your GPS and your done. Hard pressed to beat the price even if you made one yourself too.

very cool. just ordered it. now, just need wait for it to arrive, make me a custom serial cable and get the balls to soder for the first time. then i will have gps on my empeg. heh.

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very cool. just ordered it. now, just need wait for it to arrive, make me a custom serial cable and get the balls to soder for the first time. then i will have gps on my empeg. heh.

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I'm almost ashamed to admit I didn't solder when assembling my gps unit at all (except for attaching wires to the 7805). I just stripped wires and twisted them together and isolated them up with electrical tape. The end result is my gps unit looks like crap but it works, sometimes a joint does come undone though...

I didn't find any discussion abour European maps, so I ask here. Is this possible?

Rolf

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I didn't find any discussion abour European maps, so I ask here. Is this possible?

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The roadmap guys are working on modularizing the map format to allow for other map formats. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any freely available governmental map source in Europe as their is in the U.S. (i.e. TIGER). Go tell your government to get rigjt on that...

>Go tell your government to get rigjt on that...

As you might be aware of, they have much to do to get things working here :-). No spare time for that, I think.

Well, end of November I'm in Miami, maybe I can take the empeg with me :-).

Rolf

I finally had a play with Roadmap+GPSapp, and I think it's pretty cool!

I agree that it would be important to get the zoom levels for the two programs working the same. That's really all that's missing. It's very strange to see them desynchronized on the screen.

Am I imagining things, or is there more latency or "lag" in roadmap than there is when just using GPSapp by itself? By lag I mean that the time between the moment when I press on the brakes and the time that I see my little pointer on the screen actually slow down, seems longer. As well as: seeing an intersection approach in Roadmap, I get the feeling that I've overshot it sooner than I would have if it were just in GPSapp. Any comment on this?

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As well as: seeing an intersection approach in Roadmap, I get the feeling that I've overshot it sooner than I would have if it were just in GPSapp. Any comment on this?

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Yeah, I've noticed this too. I'm not really sure if the problem is that Roadmap is a little slow (you should see all the stuff Roadmap does in the code!), or the fact the NMEA messages and updates only come once per second and the delay is more noticeable when you can actually see the intersection on the screen. I was thinking about putting in a GPS with a binary mode that updates more than once a second to test this, but I'm not sure GpsD or GPSApp support faster updates.

gpsd updates when it gets an update from the gps receiver. gpsapp updates when it gets an update, which if you use gpsd in raw mode like gpsapp does is "when an update comes in"

so you get updates as often as your gps receiver gives them too you

Cool, so at least I know I'm not the only one seeing it. You're right, it could be an optical illusion just because you can see the approaching intersection better in roadmap.

I've been running into other troubles with roadmap. I tried it again on my lunch break, and it wouldn't stay up. I would start it via the hijack menu, it would blink up on the screen for a couple of seconds, then disappear from the screen except for some pixels in the lower left corner of the screen. Then the keyboard inputs would be all wonky and I would have to reboot the player. Sometimes it would stay up on the screen but then all the keyboard input wouldn't work right (left-right went to the player instead of to gpsapp).

I wonder if it was crashing out, and that's the symptom.

I tried increasing my reservecache from 48 to 64, and it seems to run, but keyboard input is still wonky (top and bottom button don't work but left-right do work).

Does this thing try to load every single map into memory at once? I've got CA, NV, OR, and WA on the thing right now. Would it work better if I deleted some of them?

The way I've found to crash it is to try and zoom out too far. It doesn't seem to have overview information, and tries to build it from the entire database. So it's possible you got close to where it really slows down and then pressed a few more times, keeping it busy for quite a while. That shouldn't explain why you'd have problems across reboots.

Matthew

I didn't try to zoom out very far at any point. No bigger than a mile or so. The problems were happening when I first started roadmap, before even having a chance to reach the zoom buttons.

I thought possibly it was a serial port problem, but even with no GPS connected (i.e. in the house but with the force-DC mode in hijack), I still have the same problems intermittently.

Roadmap does crash from time to time- I'm merging it with a later version of the Roadmap code in the next release so maybe that will help this. It does seem when a userland app crashes though that you lose the player, becuase hijack will never go back to the player screen. The only way around this I've found is to ftp to the player and send "quote site rw", for some reason the act of putting the "mounted r/w" pop-up on screen gets you back to the player screen.

As far as memory goes Roadmap only loads what it needs at any given time, so you don't have to worry about it loading all your maps unless your zooming out really far.

Interesting. Okay, well it seems I get roadmap crashing very very frequently, so I wonder what's causing it. Whereas gpsapp doesn't.

I'm looking forward to seeing the next release.

Update:

Removing Emphatic from config.ini seemed to make Roadmap launch reliably today.

Whereas GPSapp and Emphatic seemed to coexist peacefully when given enough reservecache, Roadmap and Emphatis don't seem to get along at all, even when I feed them with as much as 64 blocks of reservecache.

Hi Tony,
I know I’ve said this about 100 times already. I think even half of those times where directed to you.

The Launcher userland app works perfect for this problem. I have Emphatic, empacman, telnet (start and stop), a file viewer, GPSApp+Roadmap, plus I think maybe a couple others I can't remember. All of which are binded to the launcher program.

Each of the programs functions near perfectly, the only bug I see is if I start up multiple userland programs at once, then GPSApp+Roadmap will flicker like you've described above. A simple removal from the cage will solve the problem, and launcher will let you start up any of the userland programs without modifying your config.ini file.

I also don't have reservecache set in my config.ini so that may be why I see Roadmap flicker after I also start up say empacman.

Anyways, I love launcher, it lets me have every userland program at my fingertips to show off at any moment without having to re-sync my empeg to bind a different program to hijack. (which I think takes up memory even if you don't select the app?)

I’m not trying to be rude, its just I think a lot of people may be able to benefit from using the launcher program. Plus it will be really nice after mark finds some free time to integrate something like this inside of hijack. Actually, another nifty feature would be a kill process function directly on the empeg. So we could just “force quit” the buggy userland program, without power cycling the empeg.

[homer]mmmmmmm…. Kill process ….. mmmmmm[/homer]

I was seriously considering trying out Launcher (again) after posting that. Each time I notice something like this, I consider trying out launcher.

One question:

If I use Launcher to start a userland app, must I first select it in Launcher, then select it again in the Hijack menu?

If I use Launcher to start a userland app, must I first select it in Launcher, then select it again in the Hijack menu?

Yup. Userland apps can't "run" without calling Hijack's WAITMENU, which only returns after your app has been selected from the Hijack menu. In one of my Hijack wish threads, I suggested a new mechanism where Hijack replaces launcher's functionality and can give control to the app without having it call WAITMENU, but Mark's been busy.