The latest “beta beta” can be found at http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/development.html
The new features are fairly minor: there are options (under Tools) to change your units (miles/Kms) preference, and to quickly go “home”. The “Help” box now contains a link to the GPL, and there’s a nice “Paypal donate” button unobtrusively placed in the top righthand side of the screen (I can’t believe, considering the interest this has sparked, that no-one’s bought me a beer yet…)
Not sure how many people are reading this (as opposed to actively posting comments)… but if you’ve used the development version successfully, PLEASE post me a comment telling me which OS (&version), which browser, and which GPS unit.
Hi Martyn,
Your beer would be on its way, but PayPal only wants to accept Visa/MasterCard (and not EC/Maestro or bank transfers). :-(
Hi Martyn,
(no fear, we’ll figure out someway to get a beer or two to you)
What would one use the HTML option for (in the GPX window)?
Hi Kevin, thanks for reminding me about that!!! I’d started implementing it and forgot to finish it :-)
The idea is to output the GPX as XML-friendly (i.e. “<” rather than “<" etc), so that you could then post the GPX code easily onto a website or blog, to share with others. I'll do some more to that soon...!
Done. Now if you want to post GPX files onto sites like this, convert it to HTML with the button, then paste away…
——————————
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<gpx version=”1.1″
creator=”Marengo Route Creator – http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/”
xmlns=”http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1″
xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1
http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd”>
<rte>
<name>New Route</name>
<rtept lat=”51.45883365476883″ lon=”-0.2986264228820801″>
<name>0</name>
</rtept>
<rtept lat=”51.459462029964634″ lon=”-0.29675960540771484″>
<name>1</name>
</rtept>
<rtept lat=”51.45827212067851″ lon=”-0.2962017059326172″>
<name>2</name>
</rtept>
<rtept lat=”51.45792450087481″ lon=”-0.2977466583251953″>
<name>3</name>
</rtept>
</rte>
</gpx>
———————————
Hey, it works!!!
Okay, I am a newb. A friend sent me the link to your route planner and I gave it a whirl.
I set up a short route and then took my Edge305 with me on my way to work, and was surprised to see how well it worked. A few days later, I did a 30 mile ride and saw that my max speed was showing 65.1. This is after I hit stop and start, and nothing I did would reset it at this point.
When I connected my Garmin up, the ride I had just done was sitting on the wrong date, from the drive a few days before.
Somehow, I hit something that cleared the stats back to zero for the next ride finally, BUT … the map I put up into the Garmin is still there. Each ride I take now keeps pop’ing it up when I get near one of the waypoints in it.
I do not have any courses I can start / stop, and I can not figure out how to clear this “course”, or at least stop it from thinking it’s still active.
Yes, I’m a newb… and I’m confused.
Dear Mike:
MotionBased has a forum that can help you with the Edge.
forums.motionbased.com
I love your program! I have just downloaded a route to my EDGE 205 and it seems to have worked except for one slight error….
It appears to not accept the Route name created in either the original or the newest beta. Instead the EDGE will show only EMPTY or EMPTY1, etc instead of the route names I create.
I have downloaded and installed the latest firmware for the EDGE 205 as of today and am using gpsbabel-1.2.7-1tex on an up-to-date PCLinuxOS.
Glad you like the program. As mentioned elsewhere, the “EMPTY” route name bug is a problem with GPSBabel, not the route planner. If you upgrade to GPSBabel 1.2.8 or higher the problem should go away.
Works fine here (Firefox 1.5.0.x Debian/GNU Linux, Garmin Geko 201). Would be nice to have real load and save functions. Could be implemetecd using two small Server side scripts. In the meantime xclip is the tool of joice for loading and saving real files.
Sven
Is there any way to save the google map and use it as a backgroup map on the GPS?
No idea… that sounds highly GPS-model dependent. If you come up with anything, post it here!
I just got a Garmin Vista Cx from Santa, and have been fooling around with it prior to getting a set of maps. I have managed to upload a route generated from your webite/route planner, but it would not upload using your gpsbabel script. Instead, I had to first disable the kernel module (by putting it on my blacklist) , and use:
gpsbabel -r -i gpx -f test.txt -o garmin -F usb:
According to gpsbabel’s help, this uses their interface to the machine rather than that of the kernel module, which did not work for me (well, it would upload 3 waypoints, then crash, but even that was unreliable). BTW, this has to be done as root. I am using gpsbabel 1.3.2 with current debian etch, and a 2.6.18 kernel.
Thanks for the info David, let’s hope that’s of use to anyone else seeing similar problems. I’ll hopefully update the HOWTO to include your findings in the near future.
Hi Martyn,
thanks a bunch for the route planner. I use it from time to time to create bicycle routes and it works very well for me using Firefox 1.5 on a Gentoo Linux box. I then send the resulting GPX file to my eTrex Venture Cx via gpsbabel, for which I have written a simple GUI:
http://gebabbel.sourceforge.net
Wishes:
* The waypoints are numbered without leading digits, so they appear messed in my unit. Something like 001, 002, …, 010 would be better for me than 1,2,…, 9,10
* In Safari on my Mac mini Intel OS X 10.4 I do not get the gpx code when clicking the GPX button. Instead, the window remains empty. Furthermore, the close buttons in the windows like GPX, Load and tools doesn’t close the window
* I wonder if it was possible to draw some lines between the routepoints in the editor.
* I wonder if a future version could alternatively use openstreetmap.org slippy maps instead of google maps (as I’m using your editor to plan my mapping routes :) .
Thanks again for the tool; I don’t know if there is any other route planner for Linux users!
Cheers & happy new year,
ce
Hi Christoph,
Thanks for your notes.
(1) I’ll bear the leading numbers thing in mind. It will have to be optional, as some GPS units are severely limited in the length of the name.
(2) Yes, the development release is screwed on Safari – which is why it’s not been upgraded to beta yet! Thanks for the reminders – I was trying to think what I needed to fix!
(3) What, like Tools->Lines or are you thinking something more sophisticated?
(4) Hmmm… that would be a complete re-write, as Google maps were the whole inspiration for this in the first place! I’ll have a look at OpenStreetMap though. What’s the perceived advantage for you?
Hi Martyn,
(2) unfortunately I have no clue about JS hacking so I cannot provide any hints why it isn’t working on the Mac.
(3) Argh, that was my fault. I pressed the lines button *before* placing points and expected lines to apear. I just noticed I get cool lines when pressing the button later. Thanks for the pointer
(4) Forget it. The idea was that I can plan my routes based on OSM data. But as there isn’t much data yet in the osm database, it wouldn’t be of common use. The disadvantage of the google maps is that it lacks accuracy and details, especially when you try to plan bicycle routes. Many cycleways are simply missing.
Anyway, the application is already very useful as it is, so thanks for providing the service!
Best,
ce
Hi,
concerning (1) I have a further question about waypoint names. Was it possible (additional to the leading zeros) to add a user specific prefix? There’s a reason for this wish:
* I plan two different routes in your application. The names of the waypoints in both routes now are equal
* I upload both routes to my eTrex
* As waypoint names must be unique, the eTrex automatically prepends a prefix to all points of the secondly uploaded route
* This works perfectly, except that my waypoint numbers now are completely messed.
* Currently I solve this by manually editing both GPX files before uploading them, maybe prepending a »R1-« before all waypoint names of route 1 and vice versa. If I could specify a prefix in the route planner, I could save this step.
Yup, certainly possible. I’ll bear it in mind too!
I am a complete beginer at all this, but after spending all afternoon on it I eventually got it to work. Repeating it, whilst easier then the first effort, it is still hard work. I need someone to create gps_upload.sh for me that works under Windows and a USB connection and one that ideally is able to change a foo.gpx.txt file to a foo.gpx file, as I am having difficulty creating a .gpx file. I know that reading the other contributors to this blog I must sound totally pathetic…!!!
Hi Edward. You might want to try the version of GPSBabel for Windows which has a graphical display. This would mean you wouldn’t have to run any scripts.
With regard to your foo.gpx.txt problem, this is just Notepad (presumably) adding the extra extension when you save it. Just rename it by highlighting the icon, pressing F2, and deleting the last “.txt” portion of the filename.
To Martyn, thank you for your reply. A friend produced a oneline batch file with the upload command line in it and changed the foo.gpx to route.txt so all I have to do is save the output GPX file as route.txt, run the batch file and hey presto it works. I used my first route.txt file this morning and it works brilliantly – so thanks to all. I guess a simple (for you guys anyway) would be the ability to save the GPX file directly from the web page, so not having to cut-n-paste etc? A beer is on its way…!!!
Great news Edward, and thanks for the beer!
I agree it would be a lot easier to save the GPX text as a file directly, but there are a lot of restrictions as to what you can do from a javascript web page. I’d have to effectively transfer the data up to my server, and then let you download it, which is possible, but would put more stress on my server. I may consider it as a special option for beer-buyers in a later release :)