[FOSS-GPS] FoxtrotGPS Mapping Library

pcreso at pcreso.com pcreso at pcreso.com
Wed Apr 21 13:33:21 EDT 2010


Hi,

Yep, I'm a QGIS user since v0.2 :-) I have even used it for a navigation app at sea on top of a PostGis DB (long before QGIS had any sort of GPS support). A perl script read, parsed & loaded GPS NMEA strings into a PostGis db. A view on the points table provided "current position" & a daily cron job built daily tracklines from the points. QGIS auto refreshed the screen every 30 seconds. Did well enough for it's purpose...

My interest is aquatic, and for my purposes, collecting depth/gps data to make my own charts for the areas I frequent, and displaying them on something like a Toughbook CF18 running Linux as my chart plotter would be perfect.

When it comes to GPS today, for boat/car use, 512Mb RAM & 1Ghz+ cpu devices for Linux or Windows are pretty basic specs, which is quite different to OpenMoko & other hand held devices, which used to be the main domain of GPS.

This trend is likely to continue, so GPS capable devices (like netbooks) have the memory & processing power of recent mid-range laptops. I use an eeePC 900 with eeeBuntu for some of this stuff with no problems.

For maritime use, I generally have no internet access (although cellular modem coverage in some parts of the world is also changing this restriction) so web based data supply is problematic, and also, web based providers are not providing useful charts, just maps.

I realise I'm somewhere out in the fringe as far as GPS use is concerned, so don't expect too much development focused on my area of interest, but figured it was worth tossing in to the discussion. If you don't ask ...

I agree that GDAL as a data access library for serious volumes of GIS data om a 64Mb handheld GPS is unrealistic, but a GDAL driver (or pyGDAL tool) to simplify the generation of raster tilesets for such devices may be a viable alternative. There are a few developments in that direction already.

As regards vector data on minimal hardware, some of the spatial data support now available in low overhead embedable databases like Spatial lite are changing the situation here as well.


Cheers,

 Brent

--- On Wed, 4/21/10, Oliver Eichler <oliver.eichler at gmx.de> wrote:

> From: Oliver Eichler <oliver.eichler at gmx.de>
> Subject: Re: [FOSS-GPS] FoxtrotGPS Mapping Library
> To: pcreso at pcreso.com, "Open Source GPS-related discussion and support" <foss-gps at lists.osgeo.org>, foss-gps at lists.osgeo.org
> Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 6:50 PM
> > in PostGIS or SpatialLite, etc.
> But having done all the hard GIS work,
> > none of the products (such as geotiffs, or png/world
> file combinations) can
> > easily be used with a GPS software tool.
> > 
> > At least not one I've looked at...
> > 
> 
> Depends on what you want. On the PC side there are quite
> some tools like QGis, Viking or QLandkarte GT that handle
> raster maps very well.
> 
> On the mobile device side it's a bit harder. Most of the
> applications, just like tango/foxtrot gps, focus on tile
> servers. Or, as for road navigation, on vector maps. 
> 
> I myself asked for geotiff support in FoxtrotGps on IRC,
> yesterday. My personal idea is to replace QLandkarte M by
> another application, as I am tired of maintaining it. The
> answer was: Only tile server / cache support. But: You can
> partition your large raster map into tiles and use them by
> that trick. Of course that approach has a few caveats if it
> comes to zooming.
> 
> But speaking of a free mapping library. GDAL does a good
> job at least on the PC. It's very easy to read raster data
> from a supported file format. It's not that optimal for
> mobile devices, because it's generality seems to be in the
> way for performance optimization. That is no issue on a
> strong cpu with big memory. But on a small processor with
> 64M it behaved a bit sluggish. You can try the GDAL approach
> with QLandarte M on a WinCE device. There are precompiled
> binaries. 
> 
> Thus generally speaking an optimized  FOSS library to
> read raster maps on mobile devices is kind of missing. It
> would even be ok if it's focus is just on one format and
> projection. If that helps to speed up things.
> 
> Oliver
> 


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