Worldwide routable Garmin maps: URL REMOVED

I just download combined maps of Australia, looking great so far…

Just wondering if its worthwhile having a pre-combined sets to make it easier for people to to download a country etc…
plus it might ease to storage and CPU re-rendering a common set.
eg Australia, GB, Germany etc…

but thanks for your work …

The problem with precombined maps (especially country specific maps, which we have in abundance already) is that you cannot easily go beyond the boundaries of those maps. Before creating this service I had a few scenario’s in my mind which I wanted to make as easy as possible for the common computer user.

Travel through multiple countries:
So if you plan a trip to go skiing and therefore travel from The Netherlands through Germany and Switserland to Austria you will need four maps, combine them yourself in MapSource and then upload to the GPS.

Locality:
If you live close to a border you might be interested in downloading parts of more then one country. Others might just rarely travel far and are therefore perhaps only interested in downloading and using a small portion of the map.

This service allows you to just select the tiles you’re interested in and wait until the combining is finished. The combining is rather easy when the splitting of the planet file is done and the Garmin maps have been created. This needs to happen anyway, even if you distribute prebuilt combined maps. Zipping the maps for individual requests isn’t that hard (if it wasn’t for the server to be busy with my other projects too). Creating custom maps saves bandwidth but costs more in CPU power and disk space, but of those I have (currently) enough.

I do think about creating prebuilt downloads for entire continents besides this service though, as there is probably somewhere an optimal point where flexibility meets ease of use, CPU power and disk space…

Good project!
I think the tiles are a bit of a weird shape. Some tiles contain much ocean and little land. It might be better to make smaller tiles which are all the same shape.

Thank you.

Well that’s a result of the current automatic tile generation tools which try to create as big tiles as possible. Some tiles could be chosen better, I agree.

I just have another comment to make it completely obvious,
can you change the “Combine Maps” button to “Build Maps”

and/or add the following on the side bar

  1. select map/s (tick box to select multiple)
  2. enter email address
  3. hit button to build maps

thanks

Is it better now?

Edit: I also fixed a bug where: when people requesting almost every tile the build process resulted in no tiles at all.

Would it be possible to add to the webpage the date of the source OSM data you’ve built the tiles from so a user can tell if they need to request a new map build.

Thanks!

Yes, I’m working on that.

yeap I think its pretty obvious now, thanks,
you might also put what sort of map files it builds eg mapsource, etc…

BTW this is a great resource.

I’ve been away for some days so I didn’t have the time to report on the success. As already pointed out by IrlJidel, the MapSource installer now works fine on the new MapSource versions. Currently, I can’t say if the confirmation e-mails still get stuck in my spam filter as I accidentally gave a different address without such a filter. The link given in that mail wasn’t formatted correctly as it included the closing ‘>’ of the tag.

In addition, I have some advice regarding the tiles that do not compile correctly:

  • The one in the Netherlands is due to a very dense road network. By experimentation with the splitter and mkgmap I found that the number of ways in a tile is a stricter limit than the number of nodes.
  • In Denmark, there exists an awful amount of tags so that mkgmap runs out of heap space quite quickly while reading the osm file.

In both cases, you’ll have to run the tile splitter with a smaller number of nodes as none of the parameters mentioned above can be influenced directly.

I was thinking to put the text in email (that I added to fool the scam filters) on the web page too.

Cool!

It doesn’t get recognized as scam by Thunderbird anymore. Maybe I can remove both < and > in the url.

Thanks for looking into this, but I am already aware of the source of the problem. It’s just that it’s not a good idea to split tiles individually so I’m now writing a tool to edit the splitter commandfile so that problems like this can be solved during the next update run.

America is now also available on the server.

Hi Lambertus,
Good job! I’ve tested the maps in mapsource and it works great. The cycling option in mapsource takes now the cycling lanes (where available), cool!
The only thing I couldnt get to work is to add a typ-file attached to the maps. With mapset toolkit I tried to use a TYP file but somehow it crashes Mapsource. I had to convert the maps to a Family ID maybe that isnt possible somehow?

That’s good to hear.

I’ve been thinking about letting users provide their own TYP file and have those incorporated on the server while the maps is built, but for now I think that is too much work.

I don’t know what the exact meaning is of family id and product id. Currently I set only the latter, maybe the family id needs te be configured too. Any info on this?

All I know is the TYP file is only possible with a Family ID. I also put your map in a nuvi and here the routing seems working fine too. Im very happy to have a Garmin routable cyclemap! Hope you can add the tile of the centre of NL soon (not available right now).

Ok.

Good to know.

Yes, there were some other things to do first. But the missing tiles are nearing the top of my list.

something wierd is happening when I combine all of the Australian Tiles and try to view the australia East Coast (near Sydney)
It looks as though the map is cut off or no coast is defined.
Initially i thought it was because I didn’t select that tile but after the second time its still there.

hmm on second view its the **whole ** coast of Australia

It is possible that the splitting process has problems with polygons that crosses multiple tiles. I read someone reporting that on the Mkgmap list this morning.

From http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/page/tile-splitter

  • There is a maximum of 255 output files. This should anyway be enough with the current amount of data.
  • A line or relation can only spread over a max of 4 areas. This will probably be fixed, but is quite rare anyway as the tiles are large and tend not to meet at a single point.
  • It is not possible to work on a complete planet file on a 32 bit OS, but working with an extract of the whole of Europe is fine within a 2G heap size. A single country is not a problem at all, even a well mapped one.

is there something you or I can do or does this need to be fixed in Mkgmap? eg can we split Aust in two or reposition tiles ?

I’m reluctant to make an exception for Australia because of the way yournavigation routing database and the garmin file generation work. I’m gearing towards full automatic generation of both… Australia would be relatively easy to make an exception for but I assume this problem doesn’t occur only in Australia. This should be fixed in the tools (Splitter in this case) rather than try working around it.