GPS, Mapping and picture taking

This news reminded me of how absurd it can sometimes be when doing mapping work. I was a couple of years back in Limnos, Greece on a two week holiday.

Mmm, good food

As I've been an OpenStreetMapper since about 2006 I of course wanted to check out the if it had been mapped or not. Only some very rough main roads had been drawn there. This was just a bit after OSM got the nice Yahoo/Bing aerial photos and luckily for me there where quite good aerial photos of Limnos. So mapping I went, from my home and couple of thousand kilometers away. And got it mostly mapped in time for my travels.

Limnos map, looks good or what ? :)

Yeah, whatever I hear you thinking, what does this have anything to do with China ?

Limnos has a heavy army presence, there are many military bases and bunkers all around and a large radar installation. And for example the airport/airfield is a military area (you can even make out the planes/helicopers in the aerial images). And of course you aren't allowed to take any photos anywhere near these places.

No, not a military base (but there is one not far from here). Myrina.

What makes this absurd is that everything is available on the Internet anyway. And if some neighbouring enemy country would like to bomb the hell out of some base, all they need to do is fire up Bing maps or Google maps to find them.3

So why the hell can't a tourist take photos of these places ? Just wondering...

Arduino and GPS

I found a a cheap GPS module from a finnish electronics dealer, Partco, for only 10€. It's a bit old, from 2004 but whatever, it's cheap :) It's a Fastrax uPatch100 with a Sony chipset (CXA3355 and CXD2956). There are four different models, but the only one available is the -C9 with CMOS level serial output. Acctually that is perfect as the Arduino as you can plug it directly into the arduino (well, almost, TX can, RX needs a level conversion as the Arduino I/O pins are 5v).

I did it :)

The module outputs plain NMEA so it's easy to parse. You can also talk to it and set different parameters. Datasheets are available on the net, just google for uPatch100 and you should find them.

Anyway, I'm not very experienced with electronics but I've done my fair share of soldering, but mainly easy stuff like making my own RCA or RS-232 cables. Or easy "high" pitch breadboard.

The pitch of the device was a bit scary at first, but I was able to solder a ribbon cable just fine after some careful soldering.

I used a long flat cable and a IDC for easy attaching for any GPS project. I didn't have a female IDC connector so it cut one from an old motherboard serial port adapter and soldered that to a breadboard. And on the breadboard a pin strip for easy plugging to a solderless breadboard.

I made a very simple arduino sketch to read the serial TXD0 port from the module and output it to the serial port. I used the softserial library and first thought it was the reason for the problem I had. Only the first couple of NMEA messages came trough succesfully and then output stopped. The datasheet mentions for the RS-232 level module that "RXD0 line must be electrically connected in the uPatch100-Rx versions even if it is not used!"
My module was not the -Rx version but I connected RXD0 to ground and that fixed my problems. Clear NMEA messages startet coming!


Next is to make something fun with all this :)

Finding roads to map for OpenStreetMap

Even if there is still a lot of mapping to do here in Finland, we already have most of the major roads done. I at least are having a problem finding roads to map when I'm not driving just for mapping anymore.
For example, our family summer cottage is a 240km away from my home, and all the roads that it makes sense to drive trough have already been mapped. And it doesen't help that the fastest way is the E18, starting 100m from home and going almost straight to the summer cottage, with only about 7km of some smaller roads to drive so you tend to prefer that fastest route instead of smaller roads. Not that I personally don't like driving on them, it's the others in the car (read: girl friend :) that like to get there fast.
So I've been trying to find some way to get myself on smaller roads and I think I've found a nice way that also requires a GPS. And, you guessed it, it's geocaching! I try to look for caches in obscure places so that I need to drive on smaller roads. And the gf, not eager, but at least she likes geocaching and tags along.

Some Mapper progress...

Mapper has now a pretty nice feature list:
* Can uses OSM data for Places, Streets and POIs
o Importer converts planet XML file to sqlite database with selected features
o Reads bzip2 compressed 0.5 API planet XML files
* POIs and Streets can be searched
* Displays street and place where you are
* Setting arbitrary destination point
* Setting destination to POI or Street
* Display rough estimate of distance to destination
* Periodic distance to destination announcement
* Show a bearing to destination in heading compass
* Show a bearing to next way point in heading compass
* Quick POI Add interface (Hard coded list for now)
* Click POI for information
* Displays GPS sky and signal information
* Route way point list with directions
* Simple Track point filter (by HDOP, VDOP and angle)
* Speech output for route way points and destination information
o Uses espeak+gstreamer
* Supports both normal Desktops (plain Gtk+) and Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810) (Hildon)

Unfortunately, I haven't had enough free time to work on routing just yet, but it will come soon I hope.

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

So Nokia released a new version of the Internet Table, the N810.

But they made some strange design decisions once again.
- Keyboard must be open to use keypad
- Compared to the N800 they removed a memory slot
- Memory type changed again (RS-MMC -> SD -> mini/microSD)
- And the best of all, API and ABI break *again*
- No protection cover for the screen, like on the 770
- microSB connector, one more bloody cable to carry around and forget

Don't get me wrong, I like it. It looks very nice, much nicer than the toyish N800, but still not as good as the original IT, the 770.

Positive features:
- Slide keyboard
- Integrated GPS
- A bit more Mhz
- 2 Gig of internal flash
- Updated Gtk (even if 2.10 is already old)

The integrated GPS and keyboard should make it a very nice platform for doing OpenStreetMap work.

The next thing is to get Mapper running on Chinook and add some OSM editing features.

Mapper

I finaly got my maemo-mapper fork in such a shape that it should be usable. Check it out here.

OpenStreetMaping using satellite images

As I've written before, I help out with OSM, mainly around Turku, but thanks to Yahoo, OSM can now use high-res satellite maps for some cities. Unfortunately, only the Helsinki/Vantaa/Espoo region is available here in Finland, but I've been making some progress in drawing some of the missing main roads around Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa. I've also added some nice details like Helsinki-Vantaa and Helsinki-Malmi airports.