tangoGPS

eeePC, Debian Lenny, Debian Armel, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, RedHat  etc.

tangogps_0.9.6_i386.deb (compiled on Lenny)

tangogps-0.9.6-2.i386.rpm

tangogps_0.9.5-1_armel.deb

These are generic i386 .deb/.rpm - see below for distribution specific ones. Most distributions now offer tangoGPS - thus install directly from your distribution's package repositories - it is a better fit for your system

Debian Etch/Lenny: works out of the box
Ubuntu 8.04 (and earlier versions) out of the box
SuSE 10.3 needs "yast -i libcurl3"
Fedora 8 needs "yum install curl" and "ln -s /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4 /usr/lib/libcurl.so.3"

If you don't have a gps device connected to your laptop/computer then you can use "82.240.156.91" as gpsd host (in the config tab). [currently the service is not available]
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Debian Lenny

Directly from Debian. Yes that's right: tangoGPS runs on: alpha, amd64, arm ,armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s 390, sparc. I don't why somebody would run it on a mainframe, but it is possible: IBM s390!
Thanks to Daniel Bauman for the Debian packaging.

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Fedora

Available directly from your package manager

x64 platforms, openSUSE, Mandriva

You can find packages for more than 30 platforms on the openSUSE buildservice:

tangogps on openSUSE buildservice
Thanks to Andre Duffeck.

More .rpm's on pbone:
rpm.pbone.net

Gentoo

Supported. You know your trick...
Thanks to Dirk-Lüder Kreie.

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Openmoko FreeRunner / Openmoko Neo1973

tangogps_0.9.5-r0_armv4t.opk
See Installation instructions

 

Source tarball

tangogps-0.9.6.tar.gz

the usual ./configure && make; make install

Happy birthday tangoGPS - one year ago the project was for the first time publically announced!

And it is a good opportunity to make another release. So this is the birthday and FOSDEM 09 release tangoGPS 0.9.6. It offers two nice new features:

• track load with zoom to fit
• easy geocoding of your photos

Track load: Zapping through your logfiles has become a lot quicker. The logfiles are now shown alphabetically in the file selector and tangoGPS now centers on them and zooms to fit the track fully on the screen.





Easy geocoding your photos: pretty much everybody does have a digital camera and many of you do have a GPS. But very few do actually geocode their photos by correlating them to a GPS track.

tangoGPS now has a new menu item for letting you do this in a fun & easy way, as a matter of less than a minute:





Geocoding your photos involves three simple steps:

1. select a GPS track
2. select a directory containing your photos
3. adjust the time

This is done in the following dialog:


The GPS track can be a GPX file or a tangoGPS log file. If it is a tangoGPS logfile the track will be shown on the map.


You only have to adjust the camera time to correspond to the GPS time so that the time on the photo matches.
In field 1) you correct the deviation of the internal clock your camera until the GPS time matches the photo. In field 2) you set your timezone.



If everything went well tangoGPS will display icons for your geophotos. Click on them to see a thumbnail which you then can magnify even further. Congratulations!





Tips & infos for power users:

• tangoGPS does not copy the photos but stores only the location in a database.
• The database is sqlite3 called geophoto.db in ~/.tangogps/. You can manipulate it directly with sqlitebrowser or with the sqlite plug-in
• For the geocoding tangoGPS uses gpscorrelate.

Other improvements in this release:

New keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl-p for the geocode dialog
• Ctrl-t for the track loader
• Ctrl+click on the map to zoom in

The last one is very useful for laptop touchpads: usually they are way to fast for zooming into the map. Now you simply press and hold the Ctrl key and a sinlge click will zoom into the map. This  is especially useful for eeePC and Acer Aspire One users with those tiny touch pads.

Last not least a crasher got fixed when inserting POIs with a description of more than 500 characters.

Kudos go to:
Jeroen Hendrix for a donation
Bastian Feder for a donation and a big sample POI database for testing
Jesper Vestergaard for hinting the POI crasher
Thomas Schönhütl for motivating me to implement the geocoding

Have fun geocoding your photos! No more excuses for not knowing where you took them ;-)

Comments are open and welcome and maybe see you at FOSDEM!
Marcus

Hello, once again it is time for a new release.

Before anyting:

I'll be around the GNOME stand - drop by and say hello!

So what are the improvements this time? Well, there is already one thing that was since long overdue: the repository dialog has finally got a sane layout making it easy and a good deal more intuitive to change the repository or to enter a new one.

Furthermore tangoGPS is now gracefully handling bad NMEA output from various GPS chips, which has been the source of crashers for some of you.

Then we have some more code for the POIs (Points of Interest) which now allows the handling of large collections of POIs, for example 50000 FON locations of Europe  are now quickly displayed.

The pop-up window "this point" now lets you select the text, so you easily copy coordinates into another application.

Among the bug fixes there is one for correctly displaying the GPS coordinates if you are in the southern hemisphere or east of Greenwich.

Some things that got improved due to user requests:

• there is now a command line switch to start in fullscreen mode (-fullscreen)
• two new keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out: "i" and "o" because the eeePC has no dedicated PageUp and PageDown keys
• the geophotos are now bigger (240px)

Last not least pretty much all Google maps are now supported including satellite imagery - simply because Google has changed the addressing scheme which is now the same as for Openstreetmap. But beware, they are copyrighted and Google quickly blocks your access. Moreover they can cut you off at any time, therefore it is a lot better to use and contribute to open maps!

A really great rendering of Openstreetmap is Opencycle Map created by Andy Allen and Dave Stubs. The URI for the repository is http://a.andy.sandbox.cloudmade.com/tiles/cycle/%d/%d/%d.png.

Here is a screenshot:



The digest of changes:

• there is now a simply track loader
• the tracking status is save, i.e. after restart it will write tracklogs if it did so before
• the repository dialog has finally got a sane layout
• auto switch to map after changing the repository
• the nmea parser now handles many broken GPSes gracefully (this was a source of crashers for some people)
• the POI display now uses a bounding box. This allows for speedy handling of tens of thousands of POIs
• min 1m/s to display speed
• selectable this point info
• opencycle map added as default repo
• google sat support (because google change URI scheme)
• lat/lon fix display (now correct in eastern and souther hemisphere)
• command line switch -fullscreen
• new keyboard shortcuts i and o for zooming in and out
• geophoto bigger and closes on click
• bulgarian translation 

Kudos go to:

Svetoslav Stefanov - Bulgarian translation
Thomas Schönhütel - for finally making me releasing 0.9.5

Thanks for donation to:

Alexander Fougner
Seth Rothenberg
Ortwin Regel
Olivier Berger
Atlas Trade Group
Dmitri Popov
LUKAS KRAEHENBUEHL
Carlo Minucci
richard west
Francesco Gabrielli
Thomas Siegl
Thomas Schönhütel
Nico

If I forgot someone (quite likely) - please drop me a line and I'll add you.


Have fun!
Marcus

Chris Ball from OLPC fame posted an article in his blog about using tangoGPS on a Freerunner for a bike and ferry ride around Boston. The article has a couple of good photos including of the bike mount for the Freerunner.

In his posting Chris suggests making a donation and puts his action where his mouth is: $40 for tangoGPS!

  Kudos to Chris for the first donation, it is very much appreciated!

I'll use the money wisely for advancing tangoGPS. Currently I'm working on some more major features and if you are happy using tangoGPS and feel like supporting the development I have now added a donate button for you:

I'll set up a credits page and if you like a link to your website included please let me know!

Apart from being happy about donations I do freelance contract work and open source consulting. There are many things one could possibly develop around Openmoko and around tangoGPS - feel free to contact me.

Last not least I have to mention Nico 'Bwalack' who had already invited me a couple of weeks ago for a nice lunch in Monaco. Thanks to you too!

Hello tangoGPS users,

once again I'm pleased to announce a new version of tangoGPS.

This version is a major milestone as now pretty much everything works right out of the box: by default there are three open and free repositories, openstreetmap for maps, maps-for-free for terrain and openaerial for satellite imagery. The maps are now cached by default in the home directory - no more need to configure this, although you still can do. The screen gets correctly cleared when zooming into an area with no maps - no more garbled screen. And keyboard shortcuts are now integrated for convenient use on laptops / eeePC.

Moreover the website got updated with a new, modern and improved layout, the documentation got extended and a new screencast has been added featuring the current version of tangoGPS.

Cheers to you all!
Marcus Bauer

Digest of the changes:

• keyboard shortcuts for convenient use on a laptop or eeePC:
  

  space: toggle fullscreen
  a: autocenter on
  1,2,3,4: switch maps
  Page Up/Page down: zoom

• POIs can be deleted now
• POI entry can be in decimal, minutes and miutes/seconds, i.e.
  

  47°30'30.5"
  47°30.5567'
  47.1234567

• three repositories by default
• default map directory no longer /tmp but in home directory
• a marker get set when setting your position manually
• a line gets painted from a manual position to 'this point' for easy distance measuring
• missing tiles get now correctly handled, no more garbled screen
• translations: Russian, Finnish, Czech
• and many more code improvements...

Here is the new screencast. If you have a fast internet connection, go over to youtube and watch it in high quality.

tangoGPS, better than ever - grab a copy now, while it is hot! And spread the word, write in your blog and your favourite forums...

Note to Openmoko users: I suggest you use the official packages together with gpsd. Either the .ipk packages here from tangogps.org (Download section) or the .deb packages directly from Debian. These packages provide stability and support - so far all the problem reports are due to the FSO patched version.

Credits: Pavel Machek (POI lat/lon entry patch), Timo Jyrinki (Finnish), Evgeny Ginzburg (Russian), Petr Vanek (Czech)

Feedback

As an open source project tangoGPS depends on the feedback of its users. Be it positive motivation, constructive criticism, bug reports or questions not answered in the documentation.

Click here to send me your feedback!

Author

Founder, lead architect and head developer of tangoGPS is Marcus Bauer, a freelancer with the following skill profile:

• 15 years of Linux and open source experience
• database development of any size
• Linux system administration, including high availability
• Web 2.0 development 
• Mobile/embedded development

Extended open source experience in various environments, included banking. Project management as well as change management. Goal driven, focused, and determined to bring projects to success.

Available for consulting and freelance work. Contact.

Installation notes for Linux Desktop, eeePC, Openmoko Freerunner and source tar balls.

User manual, explaining the user interface

Frequently asked questions

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Here you find two short videos/screencasts for a quick introduction, showing the usage of tangoGPS.
(Updated: 25.08.2008)

The Project

tangogps is an easy to use, fast and lightweight mapping application for use with or without GPS.

It runs on any Linux platform from the desktop over eeePC down to phones like the Openmoko Neo.

By default tangoGPS uses map data from the Openstreetmap project. Additionally a variety of other repositories can be easily added.

The maps are automagically downloaded and cached for offline use while you drag or zoom the map. Furthermore you can conveniently pre-cache areas with tangoGPS.

Using GPS

If connected to a GPS your current position and track are shown on the map and you can log positional data for further processing, i.e. for geocoding photos or uploading streets to Openstreetmap.

Geocoded images can be shown with the correct position on the map and you can mark your favourite locations and any points of interest on the map.

Last not least a friend finder function lets you exchange your position with others

The License

tangoGPS is an open source project published under GPLv2 License. Founder, lead architect and head developer is Marcus Bauer.

...

Intro Video of Version 0.9.3:

Three students from Leeds are participating in a charity rally, going from the UK to Ulan Bator/Mongolia. The purpose of the rally is fund raising and delivering a Lada Niva for local social work - and having some fun doing so! Iain, Iain and Chris have a cool little rugged Aleutia Computer on board running Ubuntu and being connected to a GPS. Their software of choice is tangoGPS with Openstreetmap, maps-for-free and openaerial map data.

They just today entered Kazakhstan and you can follow their journey (and spent some money for their fund raising) on http://mongolia.charityrallies.org/en/teams/1480/blogs/map

They promised me to send a picture of their on board computer, for now I have this one:

 

tangoGPS in Brazil, too

And Eildert send me a picture of his Neo FreeRunner, currently on the coast of Brazil:

  Anyone else with a cool tangoGPS story / photo / place / usage / computer you would like to share? Or just being in your hometown? Then let me know!

I'm pleased to announce another release of tangoGPS, with nice new features and improvements:

• This version indroduces waypoints. You can click anywhere on the map and set the clicked point as your destination (=waypoint). The point will then be marked with a blue flag and the distance and bearing will be shown. Additionally the GPS marker gets a second hand pointing towards your target.
  
• The pop-up menu has been revamped to allow for more one-click operations. Now clicking on POIs, friends or photos will directly bring up the details dialog.
  
• POI and Photo dialogs have a "Go To" button which marks it as target and sets the waypoint marker. This comes in very handy for geocaching.
  
• New (and very cool!) map repositories have been added: openaerialmap.org for free satellite imagery and maps-for-free.com for great looking relief maps (up to zoom 12). It is just fun to surf around the world from the Grand Canyon to the Vesuvio in Italy and to the Himalaya.
  
  You can very easily add them in the Config Tab, just insert "openaerial" (without the quotes) and respectively "maps-for-free" in the repository URL. [Thanks to Pavel Machek for the openaerial URL tip!]
  
• TangoGPS now shows better behaviour with slow or interrupted internet connections. It keeps track of all tile downloads during a session. This prevents lock-ups on lost internet connection and equally prevents double downloads on slow connections like GPRS.
  
• Following an often request: the repository configuration is now robust against any mistakes - tangoGPS will now start in any case and let you correct any error.
  
• POIs can be edited now and you can choose to use your current GPS position as the coordinates for a POI. Actually the POIs are stored in an sqlite database which resides in ~/.tangogps. There is a firefox extension called SQLite Manager with which you can directly access the database. Don't forget to do a regular backup! Not to forget: you can copy the poi.db between different Computers/Laptops/Phones etc.
  
• Last not least this version introduces another often requested feature, the display of the number of tiles in the download queue.

1. Your Current Speed. The speed is only shown when more than "2" (but alway visible in the bottom status bar)
   Note: on the Neo Freerunner the GPS chip is very jittery and pretty much always shows a speed even when you don't move at all.
   
2. Autocenter: pressing this button will let the map automatically follow your GPS position. For your convenience this stops when you manually move the map with the mouse (or respectively with the stylus on a touchscreen).
   
3. Zoom level indicator, here zoom level 9. Each zoom level is twice the scale of the preceeding. Use the slider to quickly zoom several zoom levels in or out. On the desktop or eeePC you can use the mouse scroll wheel for zooming, too.
   
4. GPS position marker. The blue handle points in the direction of your heading, the brown handle points towards your destination (waypoint).
   
   
5. The yellow star indicates a POI (Point of Interest)  and the blue flags marks it as your current waypoint.
   
6. When you have a waypoint set, the upper value indicates the distance (here: 17.628NM) and the bottom value indicates the bearing (here258.9°). 
   
7. The Status Bar gives you constantly the most important information. From the left to the right:

• D7: this tells you the number of currently running parallel tile downloads
• 168: if you are downloading tiles for offline use, this value tells you the number of remaining tiles in the queue
• 5.0kn: your current speed. Can be indicated in mph, km/h or knots at your choice.
• 48°: your current heading
• a:105ft = altitude. You can set it to either feet or meters.
• t:0.173NM = tripmeter. Again, either imperial, metrical or nautical units. The tripmeter is very handy when on a bike or when walking, doing sports or just leisurely moving around...
• 8/8/1.0: satellites in view (here: eight), satellites used (here: eight), HDOP=horizontal dilusion of precision (here: 1.0). The lower the HDOP value, the better the position data. Everything below 3.0 should be usable for openstreetmap.org mapping purposes.

As always there are packages for desktop (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva etc.), eeePC and Openmoko (Freerunner & Neo 1973) , making it easy for you to install, test and run it. Thank you for all your user feedback - this greatly helps to improve tangoGPS.

Have fun & Enjoy! And don't forget to spread the word about tangoGPS, write in your blogs or discuss in your favourite forum or mailing list... 

I'm pleased to announce release 0.9.0.3. This time there are no new features but lots of polish based on user feedback. It's worth the update. There is more choice for display units (metrical, imperial, nautical) and settings get saved in gconf thus don't need to be set after every restart. Plus you can now set altitude to either meters or feet and lat/lon to degrees, minutes and seconds.
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As another convenience function tangoGPS starts at the last zoom and position. And on the desktop/eeePC the scrollwheel now zooms into the area under the mouse pointer.

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Last not least: the random noise pixel when panning to the right or bottom don't appear anymore.

I got a mail from André Duffeck today who uploaded tangoGPS to the openSUSE buildservice.

Thus there are now native packages for

• Fedora
• openSUSE
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Mandriva

Thanks to André you can find the list and download the packages here. Yeah!