Wishlist: better support for road navigation devices

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
[Please include the relevant parts of your command line, if applicable.
Don't send your password though!]
1. Create a full-fledged GPX output.
2. Place the GPX file onto a Garmin nüvi (255T, if that matters).
3. Try to start the device.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
[If possible, include the last ~10--20 lines of verbose output.]
- Expected: no problems.
- Seen: device chokes on some (long?) cache descriptions (which cannot be 
displayed anyway).

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
[Did you check you're using the latest version?]
- 3.16.5, 3.17.7

Please provide any additional information below.
- In a related forum, I saw that someone was able to convert cache descriptions 
into POIs (which seem to be happily displayed). This appears to be the only way 
to access cache information on a road navigation device, but I haven't seen a 
Linux (or MacOSX) solution yet.
- In the meantime, the only workaround would be to use the nüvi for navigating 
to start (or additional way) points, and have another device (or a printed 
description) for the geocaching itself. The nüvi GPX should be striiped of 
everything that doesn't matter - at least the short_description and 
long_description fields.
- I could imagine injecting "some" of the cache information into the waypoint 
name (I know that GSAK can do this), but that's certainly second choice.

A 0.5-th approximation would be the following filter:

  puts $stdin.read.gsub(/<groundspeak:cache .*?<\/groundspeak:cache>\s*/m, '')

(as a one-liner #!/usr/bin/env ruby script, or properly wrapped into a "ruby 
-e") which could even be run as an external filter...

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Steve8x8 on 19 Apr 2013 at 10:36

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hm, since there's an easy way to add local templates (*), what about having a 
look at this one again?

I found some descriptions of Garmin's nuvi and zumo devices, and the GPX 
POIloader would accept, and merged that with some code by Kevin Bulgrien. The 
result are two templates "nuvi" and "nuvi2".

Any volunteers who would try them?

"nuvi" is the simpler one, "nuvi2" tries to be a bit more sophisticated, but 
both they are *very experimental*. Please don't break your device by accident - 
yes, the odds are non-zero... place the POI file on the SD card if possible.
If you cannot use POIloader, "gpsbabel -igpx -ogarmin_gpi" should do (it will 
complain about the categories though). (I'll add a filter template later.)

(*) Find cookies.yaml, change to the folder it's in, create a folder 
"templates", drop "nuvi.tm" in there.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 16 Sep 2013 at 1:58

• Changed state: Started

Attachments:

• nuvi.tm

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Apparently my Nuvi 255T is at the low end of their road nav range - it doesn't 
even honour multiple StreetAddress lines (as suggested by other sites).
After looking deeper into the GPX_by_Cache_Types GSAK macro, and gpsbabel 
documentation, and playing a lot with my device (which is sloooow...), there's 
another patchset waiting in my private web space. 
Since some fields require changes to output.rb, I won't post it here now... but 
there's progress. 
Perhaps it's too late for 3.18.0 to include the template, but the output.rb 
changes might still fit in? Stay tuned!

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 17 Sep 2013 at 7:10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Having tested the latest changes (incorporated into 3.18.0), I'm rather sure 
that gpsbabel doesn't know about radial distance alerts (only on-road ones). 
From what I've read, for such a behaviour the "TourGuide" feature would be 
required - which is in Garmin's POIloader, and a separate tool available for 
Mac users only.

I'd be happy to learn some details: Can gpx-nuvi output, by just remaning it to 
xyz.TourGuide.gpx, then passing it through POIloader, be used for proximity 
alerts? Are 200 meters reasonable, would 1 km or half a mile cause permament 
alerts in well-populated areas?

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 24 Sep 2013 at 10:16

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Anyone knows how to contact Simon Slavin, the author of Garmin Mac Tools (back 
in 2007)?
Although gpsbabel does a nice job converting gpx-nuvi to poi-nuvi, I somewhat 
miss the radial alert functionality that could (somehow) be achieved with 
POIloader.
Setting status to "InfoNeeded".

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 21 Oct 2013 at 10:52

• Changed state: InfoNeeded

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Due to an accident that made part of my SD card unreadable, I had to use my 
Nuvi for caching - and it turned out that
- the "name" line (which is set in large letters) is too long to be shown 
completely
- the text part is lacking the coordinates - so even if your main GPSr is only 
"empty" but otherwise operational there's no easy way to transfer coordinates
- there's no information about cache size in the selection menu

Back home, I sat down and changed the gpx-nuvi template a bit. 
- Cache type is now only two chars
- ".5" in D and T is replaced by a ', ".0" becomes a blank

Even if I'm the only one who uses this template (am I?) this seems to be worth 
a patch.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 24 Nov 2013 at 8:04

Attachments:

• 271d-nuvi.diff

[GoogleCodeExporter]

One might still argue that a period indicating ".0" and a superscript-5 
indicating ".5" might be more beautiful, but for my purposes the current 
representation is more than enough. If you have some better ideas don't 
hesitate to tell me, I'll re-open this issue on request. (Don't tell me about 
spoiler images etc. though.)

Closing for now.

Original comment by Steve8x8 on 28 Dec 2013 at 10:19

• Changed state: Fixed