Author Topic: Free maps for Garmin (Read 193744 times)

andygates · « **Reply #450 on:** 06 December, 2009, 03:59:08 pm »

Yup, spot on.

Then there's 6: About a week later, you download a fresh map for the etrex and your additions are all there, and you get that wiki buzz.

Oh, and 3a: You notice that there's an interesting looking minor road that is off your route, and you just have to chase it down.

(I do my maps midweek, usually Thursdays, so that weekend warriors can get fresh maps with their updates. The Thursday map pulls from the Wednesday evening data set which is glommed for our convenience by some nice Germans out there in the cloud. if you ride at the weekend and update by Wednesday, then the next weekend's munky-map will have your updates in it.)

saturn · « **Reply #451 on:** 06 December, 2009, 07:46:59 pm »

OK thanks - I'm just gonna have to give this a try.

Quote

3. At some stage I notice that the map's blank
4. I'm OK when I get to a junction though, I just continue to follow my pre-planned route using an arrow that points me in the right direction

How confident would you be doing an audax that included an unmapped area on this basis? Routesheet & photocopied map in back pocket as a backup?

andygates · « **Reply #452 on:** 06 December, 2009, 07:56:53 pm »

I'd eyeball it on one of the OSM-powered map sites, like
Bike Route Toaster
or CloudMade Maps. If the roads are all present, they'll be all on the GPS and I'd have full confidence that they were up to the task.

If there are gaps and they're minor - connecting roads between two little villages where it's going to be just a mile of farm track - I'd go with it. I've found over the last year that OSM is fine for getting you around: at worst, you turn off "follow roads" and just make turns according to the big arrow.

(I've trusted it with white-outs on Dartmoor paths, so I'm either a lucky fool or the risk is way lower than people think)

When we did Dumbarton - St Andrews, there were two great wodges of unmapped road. That was very minor rural stuff; anything bigger, especially in England, is all done by now.

Eyeball it on the toaster first, and you'll be golden.

Edit to add: Since audax wants you to follow a specific route, I'd always take the route sheet along. It's often got handy extra info, and takes up no space in a jersey pocket.

frankly frankie · « **Reply #453 on:** 20 December, 2009, 12:38:49 pm »

Another tags Q: for Andy, I think -
any advice on how to display things tagged as tunnel=yes correctly?
The various online OSM renders all seem to do a good job of railway tunnels, but I haven't found a way to replicate that in Mapsource.

andygates · « **Reply #454 on:** 22 December, 2009, 02:24:48 pm »

You'd need a separate line type. The easiest would be the same thing with a casing line; if you wanted anything fancy like dotted casings it'd need to be a bitmap instead of a line-style, but that's fine - I have bitmaps for railway lines and for power lines already.

I had a dabble and the obvious aesthetic answers are surprisingly tricky for the Garmin: one would be a "faded" version of the line, for tunnels, but the device arbitrarily draws bitmap lines in a faded manner anyway. Similarly, it's not easy to do bridge and tunnel entrances; there's a Garmin object for them but not a matching OSM data object (the one you'd want is a line that has bridge or tunnel = yes on one side of a node and no on the other - definitely a tweak to mkgmap there)

It'd be tempting to use a universal "underground way" (say, a dotted line), but that would break routing!

----

I just realised I didn't do an update last week, sorry folks. I blame the office party!

frankly frankie · « **Reply #455 on:** 22 December, 2009, 06:49:17 pm »

Quote from: andygates on 22 December, 2009, 02:24:48 pm

You'd need a separate line type.

Thanks, yes. What I mean is - how can I find out which line type is dedicated for this purpose if any? Railway is 0x14 - what code could I use for my greyed-out bitmap?

Quote

I had a dabble and the obvious aesthetic answers are surprisingly tricky for the Garmin: one would be a "faded" version of the line, for tunnels, but the device arbitrarily draws bitmap lines in a faded manner anyway.

I think there are problems with rotating the bitmaps.
But I'm not after aesthetics - even a simple absence of railway line would be just fine, and better than a tunnelled line appearing on the map as not. (Needless to say there are several rail tunnels in my local area)

andygates · « **Reply #456 on:** 22 December, 2009, 07:23:38 pm »

I started my made-up lines at 0x30. There's bridleway, national hiking route and cliff edge up there on my typ-file.

andygates · « **Reply #457 on:** 06 January, 2010, 11:31:41 pm »

Bloody hell, I love the wiki faeries. Someone's added detail for McMurdo Station.

(I plonked the marker there back in the autumn and tweeted "plz to fill in!")

(Wiki faeries are the good spirits that come while you're not looking and fill in or improve bits of wikis. In OSM, much like elsewhere, they're the detail-adders and the tidy-uppers.)

nuttycyclist · « **Reply #458 on:** 07 January, 2010, 01:06:01 am »

It's even better than that Andy. The wiki faeries took a GPS down there to get the accuracy

nuttycyclist · « **Reply #459 on:** 07 January, 2010, 01:08:08 am »

That reminds me. I have a GPS trace that started in Barbados Airport and meandered to Acapulco Airport via various Islands, boat trips, road trips, panama canal, cruise ship etc over a fortnight.

That's gonna take some editing and working out what's what

saturn · « **Reply #460 on:** 09 January, 2010, 03:08:56 pm »

OK Garmin & brackets ordered, munkymap tiles downloaded - map coverage good round here but I've spotted a gap a couple of hours ride away, looking forward to filling it!

Anything else I need?

I thought if I get it now, by the time the ice has hopefully cleared at the end of the month I'll have figured out how to use it, or have got you nice peeps to explain

Polar Bear · « **Reply #461 on:** 09 January, 2010, 03:42:29 pm »

If your unit can take memory cards of 512mb or more then you can load down the entire munkymap. I do this with my Garmin GPS60CSX.

I still have some tracks of various areas of as yet unmapped Orkney to share. Set myself a project learning how to do this properly later in the year.

saturn · « **Reply #462 on:** 09 January, 2010, 04:01:56 pm »

2gb SD card ordered with the etrex.

Registered with openstreetmap and downloading intro video now......

Polar Bear · « **Reply #463 on:** 09 January, 2010, 04:06:46 pm »

I simply download Andys munky map, unzip the folder, then copy the .img file into my garmin using a USB cable. The file goes into the Garmin folder on the gps. You may need to select the new maps first time out but after that it just uses it.

The latest download I have taken expands to just under 303kb.

andygates · « **Reply #464 on:** 22 January, 2010, 12:27:39 pm »

OSM proof-of-principle in big grins: the "thank you" mails from search-and-rescue teams when their nerdy coordinator stuffs today's Haiti on their devices. These guys turn up with a world basemap (five towns, four squiggles and a blob) and expect to get crummy out-of-date photocopy mapping from the locals (at best).

Quote

I wish you could see their faces 'light up' when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I'm going to give them street level detail maps.

...etc, and that's just the Garmin side of it; the same data's all over the NGO aid-space. Some of the render-nerds are pipelining A4 black-and-white printable PDFs, which reproduce best in local disrupted tech...

/zealot

piedwagtail91 · « **Reply #465 on:** 06 February, 2010, 09:06:15 am »

Just wondered if anyone could give me some advice. I've downloaded the maps (osm?) and got them on the gps, but most of my town is missing, there are just a few main roads. I tried to add some residential streets from this mornings walk but the "base map" for my area didn't exist it was blank with an apology of sorts. anyhow i think i added the roads that i wanted to and will check back later to see if they've appeared before going walkabout with the gps.
Is it normal for most of a towns roads to not be on the map and data not be available on the gps trace map?
the town in question is great harwood, lancs.
any advice welcome.thanks.

frankly frankie · « **Reply #466 on:** 06 February, 2010, 09:42:27 am »

Quote from: piedwagtail91 on 06 February, 2010, 09:06:15 am

I tried to add some residential streets from this mornings walk but the "base map" for my area didn't exist it was blank with an apology of sorts. anyhow i think i added the roads that i wanted to and will check back later to see if they've appeared before going walkabout with the gps.

Is this using the online editor 'Potlach'? I find its often dysfunctional at weekends (though just had a look, 2 minutes ago, and seems OK at the moment). I believe it's heavily dependent on Flash so your browser needs to have a good recent version of that enabled as a plugin. Marvellous when it's working though.
You have to make sure, when you add a road, that you 'tag' it to show what kind of road it is - if left untagged then it may not be visible on some map renders.

Once you've made an edit it's live online pretty much straight away but the update then seeps through various iterations, versions, copies and renders of OSM over a period of time which can vary from an hour or 2 up to a month, depending on where you are downloading your maps from. So it can take that long before you can get the update onto your GPS, if you are using a version of the map that is at the end of a long chain.

There's a lot of town side roads etc still missing in the UK - the coverage is fantastically detailed at best, but is very patchy.

andygates · « **Reply #467 on:** 06 February, 2010, 09:48:30 am »

Edits are on the main online map in tens of minutes max; my Garmin map is done once a week from the night-before's snapshot.

(Granny suck eggs: you do have to update the Garmin, it won't slurp updates from the net on its own)

You may ignore the base map stuff, you don't need it to work on your traces. The apology will be the base layer server (for example, Yahoo) saying "no" -- but they're mostly pretty poor anyway. You can choose what base layer you use with the preferences (tick in a box) icon bottom-left of the editor.

piedwagtail91 · « **Reply #468 on:** 06 February, 2010, 10:54:08 am »

thanks, all my stuff has come up, it's just a bit offputting at first not having any basemap under the trace, with data not available everywhere.i've downloaded to the netbook about 20 rides and walks from the gps so i'll have plenty to do now putting roads in that aren't there.

piedwagtail91 · « **Reply #469 on:** 21 February, 2010, 09:45:36 pm »

well, i've just downloaded the latest update from the andygates site. My first time since i started to contribute to OSM.
what can i say, they look bloody gorgeous, far , far better than garmin.love the little trees for the woodland! it's great to see all the paths as well as the roads. Can't wait to get out on the bike with them now!
thanks andy for a brilliant job.

andygates · « **Reply #470 on:** 21 February, 2010, 10:03:54 pm »

The trees are Garmin default, y'know. Now, the little post boxes, they're all me...

piedwagtail91 · « **Reply #471 on:** 21 February, 2010, 10:24:08 pm »

they've never showed up like that before! i've just looked at the post box, great stuff.

frankly frankie · « **Reply #472 on:** 22 February, 2010, 10:43:43 am »

Quote from: andygates on 21 February, 2010, 10:03:54 pm

The trees are Garmin default, y'know.

You've just been living with your own work for too long. Your railway lines are nicer too.

piedwagtail91 · « **Reply #473 on:** 22 February, 2010, 05:58:12 pm »

i've just downloaded the latest update for my viewranger mapping on my phone and found that i can now get osm mps through it to view on the phone, unfortunately they don't have the phone boxes!

Chris S · « **Reply #474 on:** 24 February, 2010, 10:00:25 am »

Very possibly the answer to this question is embedded in this thread somewhere, but I CBA to trawl, so...

I want to make a route that uses some bike paths (Green Wheel, Peterborough). They are excellently presented on young Master Gates' map. Can I make a route using them, with some software on my PC, and if so - what software do I need?

I usually use Mapsource for creating routes - perhaps I need to load a MunkyMap into there? If so, how?

Author Topic: Free maps for Garmin (Read 193744 times)

Chris S