GP2X Tomtom For Gp2x?


michu

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well I'm tring to create a "car-pc", this means gp2x + BoB... i want to use it as mp3 player and gps navigation (usb gps mice)... i was wondering if its possible to use tomtom sw (yes of course you need to buy a real tomtom to blah blah)... tomtom allready put the gpl'ed source here: http://www.tomtom.com/page.php?Page=gpl#6.1-tomtom

as hw they use: 400 MHz ARM920T.. the same as gp2x uses, not?

does someone have some information about this topic, i think this could be interessting..

cheers
michu
 
michu posted on Aug 7 2006 at 05:28 PM said:
well I'm tring to create a "car-pc", this means gp2x + BoB... i want to use it as mp3 player and gps navigation (usb gps mice)... i was wondering if its possible to use tomtom sw (yes of course you need to buy a real tomtom to blah blah)... tomtom allready put the gpl'ed source here: http://www.tomtom.com/page.php?Page=gpl#6.1-tomtom

as hw they use: 400 MHz ARM920T.. the same as gp2x uses, not?

does someone have some information about this topic, i think this could be interessting..

cheers
michu

Yep, this was not the first time this has come up. doesnt gp2x web page list car gps navigation as one of the possible uses for the gp2x? I think the tom tom source has been beaten to death now. Personally if GPH doesnt partner up with a provider of gps navigation software I cant see any of the users being successful at it.

I am still working on mine, and will publish it if/when I finish or will give it out if anyone asks. It really is a no brainer. parsing nmea data from a gps device isnt too bad, setting the uart on the gp2x is easy, although the math seems wrong to me (it always comes out being based on 135mhz instead of 200), I finally gave up trying to understand and simply took the 115200 numbers and scaled them down to 4800. Simple pixel graphics on the gp2x is trivial, I have no idea why anyone would complicate it with SDL. Avoiding floating point math and getting from gps coords to pixel coords was the only trick (so far).

I skipped over the plot over a raster map idea because I wanted to display the next turn and things like that (was hoping to get a few to jump on board to help, but never got to a point to ask).

I was able to get a crude bread crumb trail to follow some single line vector based roads, and even detect what road you were on and display it.

Was pointed to a gba solution that just plotted position over a raster map.

Got something similar working in a short period of time, based on what I had already started with the vector stuff.

Raster maps take up lots of space, was not using linux anyway (but booting linux and loading the 940 with my app), and didnt have much space to work with (couple of meg), so I stopped work on this to figure out how to get the whole machine. Now use the modified uboot to load my .img file instead of linux, so I have the whole machine, both cores if I want them (for this I only use the 920).

I have the application binary separated from the map data so that I can add/change the maps. (instead of only having the maps near my house you could have maps based just about anywhere and actually use the thing without having to drive to my house).

My app requires a new map every 0.01 degrees (in either direction). It is fairly tedious to "borrow" each of these maps one at a time so I have been working on a way to automate this. I am now stuck trying to either screen capture or copy from the clipboard (windows, good old win32 C application level). The best I was able to get was black and white, a known problem but I cant find the known solution.

Stopped work again because my Olimex SAM7-H64 arrived.

While typing this I wonder how hard is it to screen or window capture in linux? I have all the other parts, specifying the map and coordinates to center on. Taking a window capture of the web page and extracting the map from the window. Compressing the map and putting a header on it. Collecting many maps and merging them with the application binary with a list so that the binary can find the maps.

There is a linux solution out there, runs on pcs or I guess more likely laptops. Has been run on a linux based pda or two. Is a gtk 2 based application so if you get gtk 2 running well enough on the gp2x, there you go.

Unless you buy one of the companies I cant see any chance of commercial (tom tom or garmin) software running on this platform. How could this posibly benefit them, the market just isnt there, the cost of the hardware plus the software far exceeds the cost of one of their existing platforms (choose any vendor, they can all beat the gp2x+gps receiver+software price).

There is/was software that used to run on the older palm based devices, the 16mhz machines that did gps mapping, probably not much more than the gba and/or linux and/or my app does. The companies and websites are still there but you cannot buy copies of this software. If that software were found and an emulator for the older palm devices written...there you go.

I have to keep reminding myself that I can get a new garmin street pilot for $250. How many thousands of dollars worth of man hours plus a $200 gp2x + >$100 handheld gps will it cost to get a system that is far inferior to a garmin? Maybe if you dont already have a tom tom or garmin or whatever you wont know. But I already have a Garmin 2620 and know what I would be missing. Our problem is we have one garmin and two drivers, two cars...
 
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