[OSM-talk] Finding a particular street on the GPS

[Karl Newman]

On Dec 21, 2007 7:32 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > Interesting idea. I know mapcenter is not sufficient for a huge
> > project such as this, but it's good for free testing. My thinking is
> > in line with yours--I was thinking at some point OSM might acquire a
> > full license (note that the author has a reduced license cost for
> > charities--maybe OSM or OSMF might qualify?). I'm not sure I'm the guy
> > to be responsible for running it (I've already got a lot going on),
> > but I'm certainly willing to help set it up.
>
> Would it not be worthwile to try and fix our (free) software to be
> able to do what cGPSMapper does, instead of buying (and relying on)
> non-free software that is developed by one person alone and might
> vanish any day without anybody having the source?
>
> I don't know how compilicated that is but I'm sure the cGPSMapper
> author is no magician so we should be able to accomplish what he has,
> and make the world less dependent on proprietary software while doing
> so...?
>
> Bye
> Frederik

Frederik, yes, that would be the ideal case. It's a matter of reverse
engineering. From what I can tell, the mkgmap project was made
possible by the work done here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/garmin-img/ Unfortunately I don't have
the time to give this my dedicated focus that reverse engineering
requires.

However, it's not the worst thing to use this proprietary software.
The so-called "Polish format" has sort of become the de-facto standard
for custom maps and there are a number of graphical editor tools which
support the format (GPSMapEdit, Global Mapper, etc.). GPSMapEdit even
has the ability to test your routing before you send it through
cGPSMapper. That's what I did to verify that my XSL was working
correctly.

If someone wants to focus on reverse engineering the routeable bits of
the IMG format, that would be awesome. It's independent of the work
I'm planning to do, though. If someone figures out the format, I'd
just switch the output to write to that binary format instead of text.
Note that there's a new compressed Garmin map format called NT, and
I'm guessing eventually new receivers will only support that. To my
knowledge it has not been reverse engineered at all.

Karl