tangoGPS

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)

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!

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

Here is what it looks like and now that I have it I wonder how I have ever lived without it :-)

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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!

This article is outdated. Use the download link on top for finding current versions.

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

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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

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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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