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GPS on the Zaurus

Loads of people are starting to get GPS stuff in their cars. I really want this, but I don’t want to pay a lot. Aldi were doing a thing that was a GPS receiver and a PocketPC, so you could use the PDA as a PDA and then plug it in when you were in the car to have it do GPS —it spoke to you and told you where to turn and so on.
I think this should be doable with a Zaurus. You can buy CompactFlash GPS cards, which will plug into the Z, so that would work fine. What’s missing, however, is the map data. It seems that there isn’t any freely available vector map data which a navigation program could use. Damn. (You need vector data, not bitmap data (pictures of maps) because in vector data the points where streets meet and so on are identified. Computers can’t do a lot with bitmap data other than display it; they can’t interpret it.)
I wouldn’t mind the idea of buying some map data, if that were possible. Has anyone done anything like this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2004 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “GPS on the Zaurus”

  1. The OS have “digital maps” down to a pretty good scale, I don’t know if they’re vector or not (I susspect not) but I do know they’re very expensive.

    Bill
    7 hours later

  2. Last time I looked at something like this, I saw something about people pulling the data - or at least supporting the data - from stuff like Autoroute and the various route planning s/w, but I can’t find anything about that now.

    Aquarion
    10 hours later

  3. Jeez, that’s a good idea. I’m sure I’ve got AutoRoute around here somewhere. I’ll have a think about that…

    sil
    21 hours later

  4. http://sourceforge.net/projects/routeplanner/

    written in python with newt and gnome interfaces might be a useful starting point.

    Now all you need is a script to rip (eerrrrm you didn’t hear it from me) autoroute data files to the format used by this software ;-)

    sparkes
    22 hours later

  5. I posted a link to an amazing bit of gps on the wlug list (use the impressive archive ;) ).  I’d use a laptop and winshit myself…

    fizz
    6 days later

  6. zroadmap has maps with vector data.  I have not tried the gps component though.

    chris
    18 weeks later

  7. Not an immediate solution to the problem but at http://www.navsys.org is a project to generate “free” map data from GPS.  The idea is to have a GPS-enabled device (the guy actually has a VIA mini-ITX mboard in his car!) which logs GPS data, then to have algorithms to process this to figure out where the roads are and some other features.

    If someone ported his daemon to the Zaurus that’d be a big help on this collaborative project.

    Mike
    22 weeks later

  8. Not an immediate solution to the problem but at http://www.navsys.org is a project to generate “free” map data from GPS.  The idea is to have a GPS-enabled device (the guy actually has a VIA mini-ITX mboard in his car!) which logs GPS data, then to have algorithms to process this to figure out where the roads are and some other features.

    If someone ported his daemon to the Zaurus that’d be a big help on this collaborative project.

    Mike
    22 weeks later