[OSM-talk] GPS recommendations

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi,

> I've been very happy with my Nokia N810 internet tablet.

[...]

Interesting :) .

I just bought such a device a couple of days before. While eagerly waiting for 
it to arrive (it's difficult to be patient if it comes to gadgets :) , I've 
added rendering of minor ways (tracks, cycleways, footways etc.) to Navit. 
I'm very pleased with the device and the Navit maps look just great.

But anyway I'm still struggling with the gps stuff. While MaemoMapper seems to 
do a great job, other applications (including Navit) cause some trouble. It's 
mainly an issue with gpsd on the device. It cannot be started directly but 
requires to use a lib. This one will load the gps driver, start gpsd and keep 
track of the amount of running applications requiring gps signals.

navipowm seems to rely on directly accessing the gps device in /dev/. Due to 
the aforementioned circumstances I do not know yet if it is possible to use 
it on the device right now.

Navit uses gpsd, but cannot start it itself. Thus I need to start gpsd in 
another way (open gps control panel, start MaemoMapper etc.) before I can use 
it. Unfortunately, it tends to crash every now and then. But I'm pretty 
confident those issues can be sorted out :) .

I also compiled qtgps as found on [1] to get a better clue about the gps 
status on the device.

> I've adapted the in-car holder to be a handlebar mount on my bike,

I'm still looking for a good mount. I considered the included plastic holder 
to be not save enough. I'm still looking for a solution which protects the 
N810 from jerk, dust and maybe rain. Anyway, is there a picture of the mount 
you created?

> and 
> made some minimal changes to its Maemo Mapper application so that I get
> one-touch-anywhere-on-the-screen auto-numbered waypoints (which means I
> can wear gloves in winter and still get waypoints). I can use a
> bluetooth earphone/mic to take an audio commentary on the device,

This sounds really cool. Are those features available as patches somewhere to 
download?

> and 
> when I get home the WAV files and GPX files can just be copied over the
> network on WiFi and synced in JOSM using the continuous audio features I
> added.

Ah, things become a lot clearer now :) .

Best regards,

ce

[1] http://www.lieberbiber.de/projects/qtgps.htm