Ok, I finally put in the four hours of work and wrote a program that can use Street Atlas, or any program that uploads directions to a Garmin GPS, as a source for GPSApp route files. You need an additional program to get this program to work called GPSEmulator, unless you have a Garmin GPS and software to create .RTE files. All the pertinent information for using this program should be in the readme.txt file.

FYI: It's written in Delphi, I plan to release the source later if there's any interest. Oh yeah and I don't have Kylix so it's Windows only sorry.

<standing ovation>



/me hurriedly downloads the file.

Anyone have a list of different pieces of software that can upload directions to a Garmin?

This sounds AWESOME!

By the way, what's to stop you from using GPSEmulator to upload maps to yourself and ultimately the empeg?

EDIT: I should read the GPSEmulator page before asking questions. It seems it only works with routes.

Although... the trick that GPSEmulator makes you do with the null modem cable is a PITA. A really clever programmer would write a virtual COM Port driver as a shim to intercept the data before it even got out the port. But hey, beggars can't be VxD writers...

The programs I've heard of are Delorme Street Atlas and a program by Garmin I think called Map Source, I also found this shareware called GarTrip. I imagine G7toWin could come in handy too, it can upload routes and also import a lot of different route files from other programs. There may also be a European version of Street Atlas, or MS Streets and Trip that might transfer to a Garmin too, I'm not sure.

Anyone know which one is the best?

Street Atlas is the best in my opinion. You can still get Street Atlas 8 on Ebay for pretty cheap. It seems to have the best maps than any of the other options here.

I'm sort of amused that G7ToWin works with Magellan receivers also. I don't have Windows so it's not really of use to me, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Bump.

I don't have a copy of StreetAtlas yet (hopefully will soon) but I was thinking...

Okay, the purpose of this dual-program trick is so that you can use the serial ports to fake your PC into thinking a Garmin is attached, then capture the route data that got sent to the Garmin. Then you turn around and translate that data into a GPSapp-readable format and send it to the player.

What if, instead...

Someone wrote a program to run on the empeg itself which did all this internally to the player? In other words, it sits on the player, listening on the serial port, and emulates a Garmin. Not a complete Garmin emulator, just enough of a subset so that it will accepte route files. Then it could internally translate that data to the proper GPSapp compatible format and save it to the "routes" directory. You could run it in @AC mode and have GPSapp run in @DC mode, so it'd be pretty much transparent. You could deactivate it when you needed to use the serial port for something else.

Or even better... Since GPSapp is listening on the serial port anyway... Build this all into GPSapp. Have GPSapp emulate a Garmin and accept the route files directly.

Either way, this would be so much more efficient. You wouldn't need any loopback cables or special software on the PC, just any program that writes routes to a Garmin. Suddenly, the problem of getting good map data for GPSapp is solved.

Don't you just love how I come up with ideas that I couldn't possibly implement myself?

That would obviously be the ideal. I think the GPSApp documentation states somewhere though the calculating routes on the empeg is verrryy slow (read: no FPU). I think that's why we have the python routing script to begin with. I don't want to be a naysayer though, it would be a lot of work but possible to do this. I personally don't have the patience to do anything that complex on linux where I don't have a visual debugger though.

calculating routes on the empeg is verrryy slow

I wasn't talking about calculating routes on the empeg. I was saying: still use StreetAtlas to calculate the routes and send only the route file into the empeg. Just like now. But skip the loopback-through-two-more-Windows-programs trick, and instead make the empeg itself emulate a Garmin rather than have another Windows program emulating the Garmin. Just enough to grab the route file. At that point, the empeg wouldn't have to calculate anything, it would just do a file format translation.

Sorry should've been more clear- it's more like the translation of the routes is slow. This is because you have to take all the floating point waypoints from Street Atlas or whereever, find the minimum,maximum points, find the center point, and then project all the points around the center in integer distances.
This probably could be optimized though, I remeber back in the day people pulled all kinds of tricks to run 3d programs on CPUs with lousy FPUs- fixed-point math comes to mind. Still this wouldn't be an easy project..

This is because you have to take all the floating point waypoints from Street Atlas or whereever, find the minimum,maximum points, find the center point, and then project all the points around the center in integer distances.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought StreetAtlas just fed lat/long coordinates into the route file, and that all GPSapp used in its file was lat/long coordinates. I guess I just don't understand how it works.

The map screen uses UTM coordinates so that N pixels up or down is the same distance as N pixels sideways. Combined with the scale you could actually use a ruler and calculate the precise distance between two points.

It makes the routing a bit simpler, because the code can use simple integer multiplications to calculate the distance between two arbitrary points instead of having to resort to sines and cosines.

Something you might want to point out in the readme file...

If both your COM ports are on the same IRQ, you probably aren't going to get this thing working right away.

I'm going to mess with my IRQ's now...

Hm, even that didn't work. Even after fixing my IRQ's, I get, out of GPSEmulator:

DSR
CTS
DSR
TXFULL
PRODUCT TYPE REQUEST
wrong checksum
wrong checksum
wrong checksum
TXFULL
PRODUCT TYPE REQUEST
wrong checksum
wrong checksum
wrong checksum
PID_RECORDS
TXFULL
PRODUCT TYPE REQUEST
PRODUCT TYPE REQUEST
PID_RECORDS

And no route points loaded.

aha, that was the problem all along. In your README file, it was adamant about only sending the ROUTE POINTS to the GPS emulator. But when I chose "ROUTE DIRECTIONS" instead of "ROUTE POINTS" it worked fine.

Your readme gives examples from a different version of StreetAtlas, I think. The menu options and stuff in SA USA 2K3 seem to be different from what your readme instructions expected to see.

Argh, but as you said in the readme, those only give you "as the crow files" directions.

So I can't seem to get the route points to transfer to GPSEmulator, only the directions.

And in your instructions you say do "Edit/Copy Directions" and paste them into FromSA, but in my version of SA that menu item doesn't exist.

Argg...

I have never seen SA 2K (I use SA 8), but I'm sure there is some way to Copy the text directions, it's probably just hidden away somewhere. Have you tried right-clicking in the directions window? As a last resort if there's a window that shows all the waypoint names, can you just select the text in this window and hit Ctrl-C to Copy? Whenever you figure out how to copy these directions please send me a sample (Paste it into Notepad and save) so I can add a filter in FromSA for it. When you are ready to Paste this info into FromSA you will probably have to uncheck "I am pasting from Streetfinder" and strip out all information from the pasted text except for the waypoint names, one per line. This checkbox determines whether to filter based on SA 8's direction format so I doubt it will strip it out automatically for you, although it might. If you hit generate and it strips everything except the names you will know if it worked or didn't.
As far as the as the crow-flies directions go, that is happening because you don't have a latitude/longitude file. In SA 8 you go to File..Export Route as Lat/Lon file or something like that to get the file. I'm sure they still have this in SA 2K somewhere since this featue has been around since like SA 2. Look around in the file menu for Export options or try the help, what your looking for is an option to generate a file with a list of route points called a Lat/Lon (Latitude/Longitude) file in Street Atlas terms.
If you don't find this but find other export options let me know, and if possible send a file with an exported route to me. They may have changed the format some in SA 2k and I'll have to write a filter for these files.

I'm sure there is some way to Copy the text directions, it's probably just hidden away somewhere.

I can't find it. For instance, your instructions say I should use the "File" menu or the "Edit" menu. This thing doesn't have a menu at all, it's all button-and-tab style.

As a last resort if there's a window that shows all the waypoint names, can you just select the text in this window and hit Ctrl-C to Copy?

It's not a text list, it's a table interface with rows and columns and doodads and geegaws. I can't select more than one row of the table at the same time.

The interface is really rather cryptic, and appears to be 180 degrees different from your description of the version 8 software.

All right, I think I found a place to do "Export" in StreetAtlas 2K3, it's the only place I could find it. The problem is that it exports what they call the "Draw Layer". And by default, there's nothing on the draw layer. You can copy stuff from your map to the draw layer, for instance, you can select a segment of your planned route and copy it to the draw layer. But you have to do it one segment at a time. I can't see how to export the entire route in one step.

Arg, this is frustrating. StreetAtlas 2K3 is a nifty program, and it looks like it does oodles better than MapsOnUs in terms of accuracy, so if I could get it working with GPSapp, I'd be a happy boy.

StreetAtlas 2K3 automatically saves each of your programmed routes as an ".ANR" file, a binary file which seems to have all of the directions and street names in it. I wonder if someone has reverse-engineered this file format, and if we can use it directly via a converter program?

I just read on a newsgroup there is no way to generate a lat/lon file in SA2K3, which is kind of a bummer. There may be other ways to get the desired information out of SA2K3 though, including getting GPSEmulator to understand track points and waypoints. I'll do some research on file formats and such and see what I can come up with.