[OSM-talk] voice recorders

[Rick Collins]

At 04:44 PM 10/19/2007, Christoph Eckert wrote:
>Hi,
>
> > Maybe Garmin will make a GPS with a voice recorder and a camera.
>
>there's even more I'd wish, like storing waypoint to the external card
>and the like.
>The Garmins are cool for outdoor use, but frankly, due to the price and
>their behaviour about map licensing/unlocking, I'll never buy a Garmin
>product again. Is there an open source GPSr anywhere ;-) ?

No, but I have talked about making one.  I am a hardware designer and 
I think the task is very doable.  The hard part is the software of course.

But then again, you can get most of what you want in a PDA with a 
bluetooth GPSr.  This is not typically as rugged as a regular 
handheld GPSr, but it is a good start.  Again, the software is the 
chink in the armor.  There are any number of OS, free or commercial 
programs available for a PDA to make it emulate a GPSr, but I have 
not found one that does the whole job as well as my Meridian.  Then 
again, I am using my Palm with BT GPSr to record tracks for OSM.  I 
can control how often it lays down the points while on the Meridian I 
have no control.

To me the first step toward an OS GPSr would be to develop a !good! 
program for a PDA.  The one OS program I tried didn't even make it 
out the door before it crashed my Palm.  To produce something like 
cotoGPS should not be a major effort, then it can be expanded to 
provide a moving map display based on OSM data.  That would be my total joy!

Once this program works well, a GPSr platform could be developed that 
makes use of this same program, but in a rugged case and with an 
optimized user interface and based on an OS OS.