tangoGPS

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.

Thus there are now native packages for

• Fedora
• openSUSE
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Mandriva

I am pleased to announce Version 0.9.0.1, introducing another feature that I have always wanted to have: Adding points of interest. Whenever you find a nice little Restaurant or a great Pub, just add it to your favourites. You are an avid fan of geocaching? Just add them to the list of your POIs.

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A major new feature has landed and albeit still experimental I'm quite excited myself about it: viewing geocoded photos.

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Version 0.8.0 digest:
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New feature:

• showing geocoded photos

Other:

• satellites in view are now shown
• bugfix for lock-up when no gpsd is running

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1: (satellites in view)/(satellites used)/(HDOP): 1/0/0.0

2: clickable photo icon

3: geo photo

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Screenshot of the desktop/eeePC version:
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So how do you get your photos into it?

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Step 0:

install sqlite3 and jhead, download geotag2db.pl

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Step 1:

You need geotagged photos with GPS info in the EXIF data. See in the doc section for more info/howto. There is a new article about correlating photos and tracks.

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Step 2:

Run:

geotag2db.pl /directory/with/your/photo/direcories

This produces a /tmp/geophoto.db

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Step 3:

Load the photo info database

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Now click on any photo icon and select geo photo in the pop-up menu

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Et voila! A thumbnail of the photo is shown.

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Downloads

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tangogps_0.8.0_i386.deb . Debian, Ubuntu, eeePC

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tangogps-0.8.0-2.i386.rpm . SuSE, Fedora etc.

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tangogps_0.8.0-r1_armv4t.ipk . Openmoko Neo 1973 / Neo Freerunner

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tangogps-0.8.0.tar.gz . Source tarball

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geotag2db.pl . Script to extract EXIF GPS data into sqlite3 database

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You have no geotagged photos but want to see/test yourself? Here are some photos and a database:

geophoto.tgz - save it to your /tmp directory, then

 cd /tmp && tar xfvz geophoto.tgz

 That's it.

Comments as always welcome!

Using your tracks and gpscorrelate you can easily geotag your photos in five simple steps.

You need

• a camera
• GPS
• gpscorrelate / gpscorrelate-gui
• convert2gpx.pl

Finally I found some time to play with making real packages for Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora. It is a first shot, please leave feedback about success in the comments.

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Debian / Ubuntu
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tangogps_0.7.98_i386.deb
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SuSE / Fedora
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tangogps-0.7.98-2.i386.rpm
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You need to install libcurl3 on SuSE, too.
On Fedora you need to make a symlink from libcurl4 to libcurl3:

ln -s /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4  /usr/lib/libcurl.so.3

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eeePC
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The debian package should install on the eeePC too. I would like to get feedback from somebody having an eeePC:

dpkg -i tangogps_0.7.98_i386.deb

should do the trick.

Quoting from a mail John Locke wrote to the Openmoko mailing list:
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"Fantastic work on TangoGPS--it's seen more use than anything else on my
Neo... and today I just tested out the tracking feature, following
Marcus's instructions to upload my map to openstreetmap.org for some
trails in a local park... great fun!

That brings up a question, though--when my contributions reach the map,
how do I refresh the maps I've already downloaded? Is there a setting to
make TangoGPS check to see if there's a newer version of a tile? I'm not
set up for GPRS, and I've got quite a few tiles downloaded to the sd
card I'd rather not lose..."

That was 58 minutes ago and I really did not intend to make a release tonight. I rather intended to go to sleep. But hey, such a great feedback deserves an answer and here it is: Version 0.7.98 - featuring the many times wished for pre-download of areas.
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You can fetch up to six zoom levels deeper the current visible map. Old tiles will be refreshed.
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Other features / improvements:

• friends are now shown with little icons instead of green spot
  (see screenshot)
• mutlithreading bug in friend function removed
  (could sometimes freeze part of the UI)
• correct handling of the tilde as part of directory in the config
• several minor things

Download

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tangogps_0.7.98-r1_armv4t.ipk - Openmoko
tangogps0.7.98 - binary with the usual caveats
tangogps-0.7.98.tar.gz - tarball
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Comments welcome!

The first page update in the documentation section is out, a quick guide how to use tangoGPS to improve Openstreetmap:
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Howto-contribute-to-OpenStreetMap

Step by step guide to use the Neo for contributing to OSM

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In five easy steps from a track log to a new way in OpenStreetMap.

Used software: JOSM and convert2osm.pl together with gpsbabel.

I am pleased to announce version 0.7.7

New features:

• OnScreenDisplay of speed
• track is now a line
• positional cursor
• number of running tile downloads info in status bar
• perl script to convert tracklogs directly to .osm files

Under the hood:

• fixed memory leak introduced with 0.7.6
• code clean up = zero compiler warnings now!

Tested on the snapshot of 27th of march. You need to -force the install of gpsd. Other than that installs and runs w/o problem.

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Download:

openmoko package
tarball
i386-binary

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Maps are automagically downloaded and cached for offline use while you drag or zoom the map. Additionally you can conveniently pre-cache areas.

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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 can be shown with the correct position on the map.

A friend finder function lets you exchange your position with others.

License: GPLv2

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Technology

tangoGPS is a GTK+ application fully developed on the desktop and then simply crosscompiled for the Neo. It is written in C and uses the following libs:

• GdkPixbuf
• gconf-2
• dbus
• gthread
• libcurl

Author

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Marcus Bauer - freelance web, database and mobile application development.

Open Source is my passion and giving back to the community is fun.

email: marcus.bauer@gmail.com

User manual, explaining the user interface 

WORK IN PROGRESS - check back in a couple of days

Frequently asked questions

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A new release with again lots of improvements. Major new feature is track logging. You can switch logging on and off and split logfiles with a single click - very helpful i.e. for mapping for Openstreetmap, or geocoding photos. A script is available to convert the track log into GPX format for further processing.
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Furthermore our non-metric friends will be happy to hear that you can switch to miles as display units.
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Altitude gets finally displayed - this was a bug in libgpsd which I have subsituted with my own code. Thus no more dependency during runtime. The desktop binary runs now on more distributions out of the box.
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More robustness in the code, some crashers removed (when creating new repositories, during tile download)
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Bigger buttons for easier finger use, some more UI and code clean up.
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Note: the .ipk package name changed from tangoGPS to tangogps. If you have a prior version installed, then remove it with "ipkg remove tangoGPS".
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Update:

You need to have flashed a fairly recent image, otherwise you will have some missing dependencies - notably pango and libcrypt. I will set up a package repository somewhen the next days so that if an ipkg upgrade does not install them, you can get them from tangogps.org. It is known to work with:

uImage-2.6.24+svnr4194-r4165-r3-neo1973.bin
OpenMoko-openmoko-devel-image-glibc-ipk-P1-Snapshot-20080319-fic-gta01.rootfs.jffs2