[Gdal-dev] GDAL driver for Magellan topo format

[Henrik Johansson]

Hi,

About 3 years ago I released a python program that could read and write the 
topography data format used by Magellan GPS devices (called BLX). But there 
were problem with that code, people has reported artifacts in the decoded 
data. Another problem was that since it was written in Python it was very 
slow for large data sets.

I recently decided to give it another shot and implemented a GDAL driver for 
the format written in C. The new version doesn't have the bug that produced 
the artifacts. 
Here's a list of what the driver can do so far:
* Read and write BLX files
* The inherent overview levels in the BLX format are supported by the driver
* Geo referencing works (fixed to WGS84)
And what's missing:
* For writes, the projection in the source file should be checked that it's 
WGS84
* The progress function is not called as it should in the rasterband read 
function
* Probably lot's of other things

If anyone would like to try it out there is a patch to the CVS version of GDAL 
that can be downloaded from here 
http://rigel.johome.net/blx/blx_gdaldriver.diff .

To build:
./configure --with-blx
make

This is the initial release so it's probably full of nasty bugs so use it with 
care.

/Henrik