Hanno's blog

There are two tools out there for Linux to put Garmin maps (which you can convert from OpenStreetMap Data) on devices, sendmap (proprietary) and qlandkarte (free). Sadly, both don't support my device (Garmin Quest), so I had to find an alternative solution. This should also work with other garmin devices.

After some playing around, I managed to get it running with MapSource on wine. I've used wine 1.1.0 on Gentoo, if you have problems, be sure to get a recent wine version.

Steps to do:

• Download MapSource_6137.exe from the Garmin webpage.
• Use 7-Zip to unpack the exe to some directory: 7z x MapSource_6137.exe
• Install MAIN.msi: wine start MAIN.msi
• Install MapSource: wine Setup.exe
• Get one of the MapSource Installers from here and install it: wine Setup_OSM-Germany-2008-06-11.exe
• wine doesn't support usb, so you need the garmin_gps module. If it's installed on your system, it should load automatically after attaching your device and switching it on.
• You should now have a device ttyUSB0, which you need to symlink as com1 for wine: ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1
• Run MapSource: wine ~/.wine/drive_c/MapSource/MapSource.exe
• Go to Settings -> Transfer, there you can select a serial port. Select COM1.
• Click the map selection tool from the buttons and select an area.
• Select Transfer -> Transfer to device. If everything went fine, it'll detect your garmin device attached to the serial port and you can start your upload.

I couldn't believe it, but afterwards I had routable OpenStreetMap maps on my garmin.

Hatte gestern mal wieder einen OpenStreetMap-Einführungstalk gehalten, diesmal beim Entropia, dem Karlsruher CCC-Ableger.

Vortragstechnisch habe ich diesmal die Folien deutlich reduziert (Download hier als OpenDocument) und den Fokus auf das konkrete Zeigen von Software und Interfaces gelegt.

Für Karlsruher OSM und Geo-Interessierte: Auf der Mailingliste KA-Geo werden lokale Treffen und Aktivitäten koordiniert.

Recently geotagging of images became some popularity due to some articles on popular newspages. I'm already using geotagged images regularly for my work on openstreetmap.

Geotagging images means that you add some metadata in the EXIF-header (part of JPEG-files) where the image was taken. Future cameras probably will include a gps module and will be able to do this automatically, but with today's hardware we need some extra work. Beside manually adding the coordinates, e. g. by clicking on a map, we can synchronize gpx tracks (a common format for recorded gps data) with our images.

I'm usually recording gpx tracks on my mobile phone with Mobile Trail Explorer (a Java/J2ME-software) and an external bluetooth gps device. Before starting, you should accurately set the clock of both devices (the camera and whatever you use to get gpx data). For my hardware I have to do this manually. The mobile phone (Nokia 6230i) supports timesetting via gsm, but my german mobile phone provider doesn't transport that signal. It's also possible to set the time via bluetooth, but then it's rounded down to minutes (at least with gnokii and gammu, I'm not sure if this is an application bug or a hardware limitation), so this is useless, too.
My camera (Canon IXUS 50) seems to have no way of automatically setting the time.

Now, considering you were out somewhere, made some photos while you had another device recording gpx data. There's a small skript called gpsPhoto that will give your images GPS data:

gpsPhoto.pl --dir [directory of your images] --gpsdir [directory of your gpx files] --timeoffset 0

Now you have images that contain data where they were made. JOSM (an openstreetmap tool to create map data) supports showing the geotagged images, which makes editing openstreetmap much easier (you don't have to write down/remember street names, you can take photos of postboxes, bus stops etc. instead of writing down/setting waypoints with your device).

Beside that, this brings up the question if openstreetmap should get a database of geotagged free images together with tools to show them on the map. While this brings up some privacy issues (if the photos contain private buildings, people, car numbers), even the ones without any privacy implications (nature, public buildings) would be a nice feature: Having a map and always being able to say »show me some photos of that location«.
At the moment, this is probably far beyond of the computer ressources available for a project like osm, but it's worth a thought for the future.

Update: Bernd just told me that MTE doesn't use the phone's timestamp, but the one from the GPS device. This means this method doesn't work if your gps doesn't send a correct timestamp signal.

I recently added some stuff to gentoo for openstreetmap and gps-related work.

For one, the java openstreetmap editor josm now has ebuilds. josm and josm-plugins, the first only installs the program itself plus language packs, the second installs most of the josm-plugins available. They can be enabled within the configuration.
I was a bit unsure how to handle it, as I first thought about adding some basic plugins to the josm-package itself. But as the opinions on what »basic« plugins are seem to differ a lot, I decided to do it this way.
Another new package is gebabbel, a gui-frontend for gpsbabel. gpsbabel is a commandline-tool that implements various proprietary gps coordinate formats and allows access to many gps-devices (e. g. garmin). Beside it can be used to filter and convert gps-tracks.

More to come. Probably also interesting stuff in portage is gpsdrive (which has some osm-stuff in svn, but not yet in a release), marble (world-view-tool for kde, osm-support is planned within the next months). Other stuff not yet in portage, I plan to make packages in the future: tiles@home, qlandkarte, mapnik and probably everything it takes to run an osm-server.

A bit offtopic, as gentoo doesn't run on mobiles (yet): Mobile Trail Explorer is the only free (as in freedom) software I found for J2ME-mobiles to create gps-tracks. It's a bit alpha, lacking some features and unstable, but it's free, so I hope it'll become better soon. It's a cheap way to get gps-tracks, assuming that you already have a java/bluetooth-mobile and you can get a gps-mouse starting at about 50 €.

If you have more suggestions for gps/osm-related stuff, feel free to open requests on the gentoo bugzilla and add me to the cc.

I'm actively participating in the OpenStreetMap project since about a week. Today I tagged two roads google maps doesn't know about (so at least in one very small part of the world osm is more accurate than google).
They're the Euro- and D-Mark street in Murrhardt. And yes, they invent stupid street names here.

... dürfen hier bewundert werden.

Erreicht werden kann das im Moment nicht über's normale Interface, sondern nur, wenn man hier rechts oben auf »osmarender« stellt.

Heute kam mein kürzlich günstig auf ebay erstandener Garmin Quest mit der Post an. Nachdem er mich bereits zuverlässig zum LUG-Treffen navigierte, versuche ich gerade, mich mit diverser Software (josm, gpsbabel) vertraut zu machen.

Nebst der Bekämpfung meiner notorischen Orientierungsschwäche und dem sicherlich gelegentlich folgenden Einsatz zum Geocaching plane ich, tatkräftig das Projekt OpenStreetMap zu unterstützen. Worum es geht? Analog zur Idee freier Software und freier Inhalte sollen frei verfügbare Kartendaten entstehen.

Angesichts der Probleme, die jüngst ein Entwickler eines freien Google Earth-Frontends bekam und der immer wieder auftauchenden Abmahnwellen gegen private Webseitenbetreiber, die Kartenausschnitte als Wegbeschreibung publizieren, ein sicherlich lohnenswertes Unterfangen. Dabei kann ich gleich ankündigen, dass es am 29.3./1.4. eine Mapping Party in Karlsruhe geben soll. Man trifft sich zum Erfassen noch fehlender Gebiete (übrigens gehört Karlsruhe momentan zu den wenigen recht gut erfassten Städten).