RoadMap

RoadMap .xo Bundle – RoadMap.xo Paul Fox

RoadMap is a street navigation program with roughly the featureset of a commercial GPS unit from the year 1999.

Background

RoadMap started life as a rendering engine for the free US Census Bureau Tiger maps. Over time, it has gained support for certain specific shapefile-based mapsets (e.g. Canada, and the Digital Charts of the World, and also now has support for OpenStreetMap data.

Since none of the data available to RoadMap currently includes the meta-data (turn restrictions, one-way information, etc) needed to allow auto-navigation, RoadMap currently doesn't support that feature, though it is common in commercial GPS units. A fork project from RoadMap _does_ include auto-navigation, because it is also capable of creating maps which include that meta-data. Known as the "RoadMap Editor" branch, it is the code behind the Freemap Israel site. Unfortunately, the two codebases have drifted apart. There is an effort underway currently to bring some of the editing and navigation features back to RoadMap.

Screenshots

Below you can find sceenshots of the RoadMap activitiy running on an XO.

"Action shots" running on other platforms can be found on the SourceForge screenshots page.

Operation

The up/down/left/right arrow keys will pan around on the map.

The O and X keys zoom in and out, respectively.

The square key will recenter you on the GPS location (if any), and the check key will recenter you on your current route's destination waypoint (if any).

Maps --

The RoadMap activity on the XO is packaged with nothing but a set of US state outline maps, plus a detailed map of the city of San Francisco (which is a nice looking, and doesn't take much space). (That's all I have that's easy to package -- my apologies to the rest of the world!)

RoadMap on the XO will attempt to find maps from the activity bundle directory itself, and also from _any_ directory called "RoadMap.maps" on an installed removeable device. i.e. it will search in "/media/*/RoadMap.maps".

So if you download maps from http://roadmap.sourceforge.net/maps.html, or if you run buildmap_osm to fetch OpenStreetMap maps, you should put them under RoadMap.maps on your SD card or on a USB memory stick.

As an example -- I have maps for several New England states loaded on my XO. My SD card contains:

   $ ls /media/d0a9...ee70/RoadMap.maps
   ct/ ma/ me/ nh/ ri/ usdir.rdm vt/

If you're using the OSM quadtile maps, the "Find by Address" and "Find by Intersection" menu entries will _not_ work. Only "Find by Position".

GPS --

As provided, RoadMap will access your USB-connected GPS device directly. For most such devices, this will work fine, as long as the GPS device is the first serial USB device that your system discovers (which is to say, as long as your GPS is on /dev/ttyUSB0).

If you'd prefer to use the free "gpsd" daemon to manage the GPS, then you'll want to install gpsd with "yum install gpsd", and change the method under File --> Preferences --> GPS --> Source to "gpsd2://localhost".

Contributors

RoadMap's home page is here. Originally written by Pascal Martin, RoadMap is currently maintained by Paul Fox and other contributors to the RoadMap mailing list.

If you wish to help, please join the mailing list! If you wish to rebuild the activity bundle, for whatever reason, start with the CVS version of RoadMap from sourceforge. Simply cd into the "sugar" directory and run the "mk_activity" script that you'll find there. If you come up with improvements (which probably won't be hard), please send feedback.

To Do

Download of OpenStreetMap maps without needing an external program would be nice.

UTF-8 labeling of streets would make the author look far less provincial.

We can't seem to find our way to auto-navigation. Currently none of the datasets from RoadMap gets its maps has the metadata needed for navigation.

See the RoadMap home page for a lot more information.

Comments, Suggestions, Requests

Feel free to leave comments, but if you'd like to participate more fully, please subscribe to the RoadMap mailing list.

Activity Summary

Icon:	Sugar icon::Image:RoadMap.svg
Genre:	Activity genre::Other
Activity group:	,|x|Activity group::x}}
Short description:	Short description::RoadMap is a GPS-enabled street navigation program.
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URL from which to download the latest .xo bundle	Activity bundle::
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The releases with which this version of the activity has been tested.	,|x|Software release::x}}
Development status:	Devel status::5. Production-stable
Ready for testing (development has progressed to the point where testers should try it out):	,|x|Ready for testing::x}}
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test plan available :
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URL from which to download the last .xo bundle that works with old releases	Activity bundle::http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/bundles/RoadMap-3.xo
Activity version number:	Activity version::1
The releases with which this version of the activity has been tested.	,|x|Software release::x}}
Development status: