tangoGPS

tangoGPS now supports heart rate monitoring and logging

The next release of tangoGPS is out and the main new features are:

• support for the new gpsd protocol
• further improved speed and usability 
• support for Zephyr HxM heart rate monitors
  
• logging of your heart rate, fully synchronized with the GPS track
• new polish translation
  
• New shortcut F5 refreshes the tiles of the current view

The summer is here and in order to get fit for the beach some sport is due to get back in shape. To monitor your fitness progress tangoGPS now includes functionality for the support of heart rate sensors from Zephyr, namely the HxM bluetooth belt:



You can use it together with your laptop but naturally it is more fun on a handheld device like the Openmoko Freerunner. The usage is rather simple, just put it on and see your current heart rate in beats per minute displayed on the screen (1):



For the configuration you only need to put in the Bluetooth Address of the belt. You can find it with hcitool:


Just note down the number and insert it in (2).

That's it. You are ready to go and start your fitness workout program! Just a few weeks later you will see the result:

       
                        Copyright by sa Tobyotter, stefanpinto
 

 
One source for the heart rate monitors is hackable-devices.org, a recently started community platform and shop for open and hackable hardware. You find plenty of interesting stuff there from Arduino boards over RFID devices and plenty of self-soldering kits. hackable:Devices is based in Europe and you find the Zephyr HxM heart rate sensor here.




Kudos
The heart rate monitor idea and first patches are from Tobias Prousa.
Adam Flisiński supplied the polish translation.
In case I forgot someone here, please drop me a mail!

Donations
Bernhard Höll
Neil Jerram
Max Dörfler
Joseph Marsden
Nukri Komin
José Ramón Torregrosa Durán

Thanks! Have fun and see you at the next Iron Man...

tangoGPS software of choice on Touch Book

I am happy to announce another milestone of success for the growing community of tangoGPS: AlwaysInnovating has choosen tangoGPS as the default map viewer and gps application for the Touch Book.



The philosophy of the Touch Book is:

• open source
• open hardware
• open community

The base of the Touch Book is another open hardware, the BeagleBoard, based on the Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor.  This gives an outstanding long battery time of 10+ hours and is expected to extend to two days with future software upgrades.

The keyboard of the Touch Book can be detached and then you have the open source and open hardware equivalent of the iPad! Certainly a bit less slick but therefore fully hackable - you can develop any application you want and put it on the Touch Book, a great base for community as well as business applications. Think for example of disaster recovery software where you need long running and low power consuming electronics.

tangoGPS was chosen for its user-friendliness, speed and excellent support of embedded platforms and a solid user base of more than 100.000 users on platforms ranging from the Openmoko phone, smartQ MIDs, netbooks like the eeePC, laptops and even the AS/390. It has found a home on more than 40 distributions.

More test reports will soon follow, for now have a look at the video from AlwaysInnovating, made by the founder and CEO Gregoire Gentil:



As always, your ideas, patches, blog posts and feedback about tangoGPS are very welcome. If you want you can leave a comment right below.

Have fun! And welcome on board!

Improvements all over

tangoGPS has always been the fastest map&gps viewer for Linux and now it is even faster. As tangoGPS is approaching version 1.0 I have spend some time on profiling the code. The results are fabulous, especially on handheld / embedded systems and netbooks like the eeePC or the Acer Aspire one. The CPU usage on a Samsung 6410 has come down from 8-9% to 2%. This should greatly improve battery life.

So we have now:

• longer battery life
• less CPU usage
• much improved map responsiveness
• last not least: the world now wraps around

Kudos go to Sander van Grieken for the dutch translation.

Enjoy!

Update:
You can get new 0.99.3 packages for Ubuntu on getdeb

Maps for Australia

For those living in Australia or going to Australia, David Bannon has written an article about how to make the free ECW maps usable under tangoGPS. It is the official raster maps of the Australian government, they are free to use but unfortunately not freely redistributable. Otherwise I'd host them on tangogps.org. You find his article here: Converting ECW maps to the OSM Tile format.

 

Packages for Xandros/eeePC

David Roberts has done a good deal of work to compile and build tangoGPS for the original Xandros on eeePC, being installable on older Debian versions with older libraries. If you have an eeePC or any other older Debian-based installation, try his package. You can find it in the Download section.

 

Google Map Sources

I guess my stance on those is already well known - go and contribute to OpenStreetMap. If you still want to use Google maps, make sure you know about their terms and conditions. The american law knows about "fair use", so maybe for some testing you can use the maps together with tangoGPS but it is your responsibility, not mine. In any case you get quickly a 24hour google block if you download too many maps.

You still want to have a look at google maps? Okay, these do currently work:
Google satellite http://khm.google.com/kh/v=53&x=%d&y=%d&z=%d
Google maps http://mt0.google.com/vt/hl=en&x=%d&y=%d&z=%d

These URLs change regularily and there is no guarantee that you can use them tomorrow... Hey, have I already mentioned that you should contribute to Openstreetmap? It is fun and can become quite addictive. And it is a lot more fun if there is a void in the place you want to map.

Actually there is word that some OSMers plan their hoilday location by looking for places not yet mapped. Last not least Openstreetmap is used in disaster recovery efforts, right now in Haiti. Isn't that good motivation for you to start too? :-)

For a good example of the reactivity of the Openstreetmap community compare the following screenshots. The first is Openstreetmap and the second is the very same location in Google Maps:

This release brings an overhauled friend page, plus new keyboard shortcuts and several fixes for glitches that came in 0.99.1.

A screenshot says more than a many words - but even better, try the latest version yourself! TangoGPS has now found a place: 43.694347 / 7.281404. Thus if you want to play with the message service, that's where you can find tangoGPS.

Screenshot Friend Page



The new keyboard shortcuts are arrow left-right and up-down for moving the map.


Kudos

Plenty of kudos go to David Roberts who wrote several detailed suggestions for the user interface.


Donations
Thanks go to:

Francesco R.
Richard West (3rd donation!)
David Roberts

A new release of tangoGPS is out

A new version of tangoGPS is released. Two major milestones have been achieved:

• layout improvements for both small and big screens
  
• addition of route tracks  

Layout Changes

The user interface has been revamped which largely improves user experience on small screens like on handheld devices like the Openmoko phone as well as on medium sized screens like on netbooks and big screens like the 21" LCD on your desk.

The tabs have been replace with an info pane on the right. The info pane is opened and closed with a new button in the toolbar or alternatively by hitting 'm' on your keyboard. On small screens you have now better usage of the screen because the tabs are gone and on larger screens you can have the information open together with the map.

Below is a screenshot of what it now looks like. The map on the screenshot is OpenCycleMap.org. It is a fantastic map created by Andy Allen and Dave Stubbs which is great not only for cycling but for hiking too.




Route Tracks

A new feature introduced with this version are Route Tracks. You can now fetch a route track from three different web services with two simple clicks on the map. The tracks are automatically saved in the track directory and can be reloaded at a later time.

To get a route track click on the map to bring up the menu and select from "ways & routes" the sub-item "get route" as in this screenshot:



Map Menu


Once you have done this the following dialog will appear:



Route Dialog

In this dialog click on the "Pick" buttons to select start and end point of your route. Then select your service and click "OK" to fetch the route.

The map will then automatically zoom and center to show the whole track:



tangoGPS route track


There are three route services:

• yournavigation.org, a fully open source service based on OpenStreetMap and using the gosmore routing engine. Pretty decent results for routes up to 50 miles. Don't use it for cross country trips, the server currently has not enough RAM (November 2009). More info can be found on the OSM wiki.
  
  
• OpenRouteService.org, is being developed by Pascal Neis and is also based on Openstreetmap. The routing engine is quite sophisticated but currently not open, yet it is capable to calculate longer trips. The website offers several additional features and is worth to check it out.
  
  
• gnuite.com is a service run by John Costigan, the developer of maemo-mapper. This service is based on google maps.
  

Kudos

György Balló - updated hungarian translation
Michal Bellovič - new slovak translation


Donations

Jérôme Durand - Dinner for two (!)
Dirk Winkel - a Pizza and a Pint
Sebastian Dannenberg - two Pints

    Thanks a lot!


If you like tangoGPS and feel like buying me a pint:

Feedback

As important as pints is feedback: tangoGPS is going towards a 1.0 release, thus send your words about any glitches that you encounter as well as your praise. You can do it right here in the comments! If you like tangoGPS don't forget to tell others about it - your blog is a good place to share your experiences ;-)

Have fun!

Just a quick note: 0.9.9 is out, mostly as a fix for a potential segfault on writing to the status bar. As a goodie it comes with GPX load support. Hint for packagers: libxml2 is now required.

Enjoy!

Hello out there! This release is kind of a major milestone for me - it adds a feature I had wanted to have from the very beginning: you can now send messages to people around you. Or to people on the other side of the globe.

It is a fun feature and designed to be easy to use. Feedback welcome, especially if you send it via tangoGPS!

Apart from the messaging the screen layout has been optimized for landscape screens: the toolbar is now on the right if tangoGPS detects on start-up that your display is wider than tall.

Screenshots

This is what it looks like in landscape mode, with two additional buttons for switching the maps. The latter is very handy in fullscreen mode and/or when having a touchscreen.




Clicking on any friend brings up the new friend info dialog:




Clicking on the message button brings up the message dialog:




Last not least the messages get shown in the friend tab:



Kudos

Kudos to Joshua Judson Rosen for spotting a potential segfault in the overzoom function and sending a patch.

Have fun!

And just in case you feel like buying me a pizza :)

 

It's been a bit of time since the last release but now we have a shiny new version: 0.9.7! To cut it short, here the digest of the major new features:

• map scale indicator
• upscaling missing tiles and over-zoom
• distance measuring
• friend finder simplified, can set message now

Map Scale Indicator

This was by far the most requested feature and finally it is in. In the lower left corner you have now a little ruler showing you the current scale. The units of the ruler (miles, kilometers, nautical  miles) correspond to your general settings.

Upscaling Map Tiles

That's a very nice feature: whenever you zoom in and the tiles are missing, you now get an upscaled version of maps of a lower zoom level - thus no more white tiles!

Overzoom

This is a follow-up feature of the "Upscaling Map Tiles" - you can now go to zoom level 20 in which case the maps of zoom level 17 are used. The purpose of this feature is to make the search for geocaches easier. Once you are close to the cache you can zoom in for an easier find. One website with a listing of geocaches is geocaching.com - it's a fun freetime activity.

Distance measuring / GPS Info

The functionality for the menu item "this point" has been overhauled. Measuring distances on the map is now easy and additionally allows for measuring of ways. Furthermore the pop-up menu shows now the bearing to another point which is of great use for navigational purposes. Last not least the coordinates get automatically copied to the clipboard - ready to be pasted for example into an email.

Friend Finder

The friend tab got overhauled too. It is simpler and much more straight-forward. It follows now the YSWOS mantra - You See What Others See. This means in "fun mode" you see everybody and everybody can see you. In "friend mode" you see only people who have defined you as friend and vice versa. In "private mode" you see nobody and nobody can see you.

On top of all that you can now set a message of what you are currently doing, like "sitting in a cafe", "doing sports" or "shopping"...

To use this features you need to be able to define friends which finally is possible. Go to http://www.tangogps.org/friends/ , it is simplistic, but it works!

Translations

Hungarian and Spanish have been added.

Screenshot

The obligatory screenshot:



1) The GPS info shows now bearing between two points.

2) Simply clicking on the map extends the measured way.

3) The new map scale indicator


Kudos go to:

Patches:
Stefan Fröbe - Overzoom idea and several patches for upscaling (big kudos!)
Enrico Zini - Fix for potential crasher on track load

Translations:
Dailos Franchy Gil - Spanish
Balló György - Hungarian

Donations:
richard west (the second donation!)
Salim BOULKOUR

Have fun!

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...