Map This! v0.4

[deniska]

First off, I'd like to thank deniska, in7ane and all others who are developing this awesome tool for the psp. As a fan, and hopeful future user, I was wondering how long until the PSP GPS was ale to be implemented? maybe in the next month?, two months? I by no means am trying to be pushy, just incredibly eager to be able to use the tool myself. I already have the PSP GPS from Sony because I want to use it the day it becomes available. If there is anything that I or anyone else can do to assist let us know. I know there is a large group of people just waiting for the day the Sony GPS is supported. Thanks again for all of your guys hard work.

I am still waiting for may Sony GPS unit to arive..
So no work is being done by me yet... but other people have had some progress, figuring out GPS module's function calls....
You can try to check with johnmph from ps2dev.org forums as he done most of the related work...

[AZImmortal]

Hi deniska, I don't know if this has already been mentioned before anywhere else, but I've run into what seems to be two issues with Map This! 0.4 and the way it displays POIs. I've boxed the areas with the problems in my screenshot and I've attached my POI file.

1) If the POI filename contains lowercase letters, the lowercase letters won't be displayed in Map This! (the POI filename in my screenshot is "_San Diego Points of Interest").

2) The POI names are frequently truncated (the POI name in my screenshot is "Get Up & Go Welcome Center").

I use Google Maps Download 0.4.0b to create my POI files. Thanks a lot for creating this great program.

[deniska]

this should not be an issue in the next release...

[AZImmortal]

this should not be an issue in the next release...

That sounds great. Do you have an estimate as to when the next release will be ready? I'm taking a trip in a few weeks and the current version is confusing my girlfriend (who's also my navigator ).

[deniska]

CHANGES
-----------

- address lookup for US addresses (via TIGER line data)
- reverse lookup (shows the closest known house numbers or intersections)
- new logo, startup screen, wallpaper (contributed by DaxDce)
- re-designed interface: new fonts, menus, some layout changes, more skinable data panels, battery & signal icons, etc..
- some bug fixes: clock desplay, POI layout problem, etc.
- bundled with small NYC map and corresponding geodata file. (~1Mb)


Creation of US geodata file:
I provided a set of scripts & programs (all with sources) to get the Tiger Line data from US Census Bureau. They have been tested under cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com)...
Perhaps someone (in7ane?) could convert that code in to some kind of GUI program.

To generate the geodata file for a state do following:
1) copy geocoder folder to your cygwin home directory
2) navigate to that folder (using cd command) under cygwin prompt.
3)run following command:
./geo-map.sh [2-letter state abbreviation in capitals]
Example: ./geo-map.sh NY
4) wait for a few hours while it creates geodata.dat file
5) copy geodata.dat file to your map's folder.

Some notes:
-Some code and ideas were borrowed from Dan Egnor's geocoder (http://ofb.net/~egnor/google.html) but the data was rearranged and compressed to allow reverse geocoding and ~3x smaller resulting file.

- Intergrity of comressed data in geodata.dat file can be cheked with decompr comand:
./decompr deodata.dat [zipcode]
This should extract all the geo entries for a given zipcode (useful for troubleshooting)
- With some minor alteratoins the script can be used to produce geodata file for any given area (from few zipcodes to few states)
I attached the county codes file for easy reference to tiger line data.
Perhaps a reference file, listing min/max GPS coordinates for each county could be created. The program then would compare the map's lon/lat span with those coordinates to extract a set of counties corresponding to that map and process only these counties.


http://deniska.dcemu.co.uk/bin/MapThis_0460.zip

[trey99]

Love the new Beta with new Interface. Layout looks sharper and much more intuitive. Thanks for all of your incredibly great work! Do you usually release the source code to your betas or only major builds?

[mr-flibble]

Great job with the new release! But since it's still beta I've got a few things to bring up.

Bug still exists that was mentioned before where if you turn off your psp and on again, a blank grid is shown for other zoom levels and it freezes on exit. Only occurs on GPSFS maps, Nx picture file maps are not affected. Running firmware 3.03OE-a.

Start button menu has issue where selections scroll too fast, a small delay should be incorporated so you don't skip selections so quickly. CPU clock speed may be a factor.

I'm sure you know about this already but the GPS serial feed cuts out after a power off-on cycle. Is this a limitation of the hardware/firmware or something you think you can work around? I know the serial port is a bit finicky to initialize and stuff but with custom firmwares I wonder if it can be activated continuously which would certainly help with homebrew hardware development.

Bit sad about the satellite data (number visible, data good/bad, etc.) disappearing. I guess not everyone likes the clutter but maybe it could be enabled or disabled in the config file?

That's all I can think of for now, keep up the great work! This is by far my favourite and most used homebrew program.

[deniska]

Love the new Beta with new Interface. Layout looks sharper and much more intuitive. Thanks for all of your incredibly great work! Do you usually release the source code to your betas or only major builds?

I can post the source if anyone needs it...

[deniska]

Great job with the new release! But since it's still beta I've got a few things to bring up.

Bug still exists that was mentioned before where if you turn off your psp and on again, a blank grid is shown for other zoom levels and it freezes on exit. Only occurs on GPSFS maps, Nx picture file maps are not affected. Running firmware 3.03OE-a.

Start button menu has issue where selections scroll too fast, a small delay should be incorporated so you don't skip selections so quickly. CPU clock speed may be a factor.

I'm sure you know about this already but the GPS serial feed cuts out after a power off-on cycle. Is this a limitation of the hardware/firmware or something you think you can work around? I know the serial port is a bit finicky to initialize and stuff but with custom firmwares I wonder if it can be activated continuously which would certainly help with homebrew hardware development.

Bit sad about the satellite data (number visible, data good/bad, etc.) disappearing. I guess not everyone likes the clutter but maybe it could be enabled or disabled in the config file?

That's all I can think of for now, keep up the great work! This is by far my favourite and most used homebrew program.

Powering PSP off seems to kill the auxiliary threads, responsible for managing the tiles (thus blank maps)
and unload the modules, required for serial comm..
I am sure this all can somehow be coded around, it's just I did not have time to look in to this issue..
For now, i suggest that you don't power down your PSP while using the program (some data file corruption may occur)

You can still figure out the number of satellites by looking at the signal icon.
1 green bar - corresponds to 3 good satellites, 2 bars to 4.. etc
8 or more satellites would show 6 bars...

[kididio]

hm, is it a bug or not, can you build in a check if an gps device is connectet or not, then when you put on gps mode and nor gpsdev is connectet the prog hangs just up in a location out of range screen...
Poi´s now work fine Scroll speed is just amazing, but in the "start" menu, the button delay to choose an option is very fast.

Will the geo lookup work in europ to ?

I like the redisign too, very nice.
And, eventually can you made an language file, which holds all the dialogs, so we can make different languages in future?