Google Maps And Gps ?


Metabrowse

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Feb 2, 2010
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Hi

I choose the Pandora because of the Clamshell form factor and the size does mater since I plan to travel A LOT with that little device.
So I have a few questions I would like to ask you because I leave around September and didn't expected to wait that long (still OK through).

1) Does the Pandora is powerful enough to use Google Maps like with any others netbook would ?
2) Does any GPS USB Stick will work with the default drivers or would you suggest any device first ? (Important)
3) Maybe I should think about another GPS software than Google Maps (or Google Maps for Mobile) do you know anything working under ARM Linux ?
4) How far the Clamshell will protect the Pandora from humidity, sand and extreme temperatures (I plan to travel in arid region like Australia, New Zealand, indonesia, ...) ?
5) Concerning the Battery life, I suppose Wifi and GPS will suck most of the power. I read the Wifi cannot be turned off currently: Does this still apply?
6) Anything I should know about recharging the Pandora from USB device (Dynamo or Car lighter) ?
7) Finally, and don't hesitate to PM for extensive Dev answer, does the Pandora would made a perfect companion for such trip ? You know it's not a common device like I would say a smart phone "oups I drop it now it's broken because it's too fragile" or "I crushed the netbook screen in my backpack". I really need something reliable, affordable and multifunction maybe even easy to open if something goes wrong. Hope you understand :)

Thanks a lot and sorry if already posted but I see nothing about Google Maps and GPS.
 
Metabrowse said:
Hi

I choose the Pandora because of the Clamshell form factor and the size does mater since I plan to travel A LOT with that little device.
So I have a few questions I would like to ask you because I leave around September and didn't expected to wait that long (still OK through).

1) Does the Pandora is powerful enough to use Google Maps like with any others netbook would ?
Yes. The smaller screen may give you little real estate to work with in Firefox though. We probably won't have access to a standalone Google Maps application for the Pandora, at least not at the start and possibly never from Google. There are other possibilities though.

2) Does any GPS USB Stick will work with the default drivers or would you suggest any device first ? (Important)
I recommend a BlueTooth GPS instead. I have used several with my Nokia N800 (an OMAP2 device, slower than Pandora), and they work just great. I can use the same BT GPS units with my Palm PDA (with e.g. TomTom) as well. I recommend any BT GPS with either an MTK chipset (e.g. the Holux M1000, or the M1200. I have the latter, it's robust, small, battery lasts for up to 20 hours continuous use), or the SiRF star III chipset.

3) Maybe I should think about another GPS software than Google Maps (or Google Maps for Mobile) do you know anything working under ARM Linux ?
There are a couple of Open Source applications for the Nokia internet tablets.

4) How far the Clamshell will protect the Pandora from humidity, sand and extreme temperatures (I plan to travel in arid region like Australia, New Zealand, indonesia, ...) ?
I don't know.

5) Concerning the Battery life, I suppose Wifi and GPS will suck most of the power. I read the Wifi cannot be turned off currently: Does this still apply?
Use an external BT GPS with its own battery (the M1200 I mentioned could even be charged by the Pandora in an emergency, it charges via standard USB cable). WiFi can and should run in power-saving mode, like it's done on Nokia tablets. My N800 can run 3 days or so while connected to wi-fi, with Skype, gmail notifier, email polling, google talk applications running. wi-fi in non-powersaving mode can suck a lot of battery though. Normally you should only have to worry about that if using wi-fi AdHoc mode, or with inferior wi-fi routers.

6) Anything I should know about recharging the Pandora from USB device (Dynamo or Car lighter) ?
Use clean 5V (or 5.2V or so, it can probably take a little more voltage too, but don't go below 5V). And avoid unclean power sources, i.e. spikes and noise. For a car lighter outlet you will want a proper, high-quality char charger, which converts the unstable 12-15V car voltage to clean 5V.

7) Finally, and don't hesitate to PM for extensive Dev answer, does the Pandora would made a perfect companion for such trip ? You know it's not a common device like I would say a smart phone "oups I drop it now it's broken because it's too fragile" or "I crushed the netbook screen in my backpack". I really need something reliable, affordable and multifunction maybe even easy to open if something goes wrong. Hope you understand :)
I have done a bit of travelling with my Nokia N800, which did a great job as long as I was able to recharge it now and then, and sometimes finding a wi-fi source so that I could download and update e.g. the maps I used with its great (free) Maemo Mapper application. Navigated in Africa that way - satellite pictures are good when the maps are wrong or missing.
 
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Metabrowse said:
2) Does any GPS USB Stick will work with the default drivers or would you suggest any device first ? (Important)

NO!

(not without a USB OTG cable, or a USB hub)
Most USB GPS devices pretend to be serial ports and operate at USB Full Speed. The full sized USB port on the Pandora operates ONLY at USB High Speed. To attach a USB Full Speed device, you must either attach it to the USBOTG connector which is a miniAB connector, not the A connector that a USB GPS Stick would have built it, or you must connect it through a USB hub which will translate the USB Full Speed signals into USB High Speed signals.
This is why a bluetooth GPS receiver is recommended.
 
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4) How far the Clamshell will protect the Pandora from humidity, sand and extreme temperatures (I plan to travel in arid region like Australia, New Zealand, indonesia, ...) ?

Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia are not Tatooine. I went outside with my phone just five minutes ago and it didn't even get one bit of sand or extreme temperature on it.
 
ThaDSman said:
It would be so hot if we could get the android version of Google Navigation running on he Pandora. I'd be the happiest man in the world :lol:

Well, Cpasjuste got Android working on the Pandora, and I'm no expert on this, but that might mean it'll work.
 
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XPANSiVE said:
ThaDSman said:
It would be so hot if we could get the android version of Google Navigation running on he Pandora. I'd be the happiest man in the world :lol:

Well, Cpasjuste got Android working on the Pandora, and I'm no expert on this, but that might mean it'll work.

Anyone distributing an Android build for Pandora with the Google Maps app included would get a letter from Google's legal team fairly quickly I'd think. You'd need to work out a way to get access to the Android Market so people could download it themselves and distribute the method rather than the actual binary.
 
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Instead of hoping for something which may be impossible or illegal, you could go with something free and open, like Navit which is already in the Angstrom repo. Or tangoGPS, also in the repo. Or possibly others if they have been or can be ported.

As for GPS receivers, I'm fairly certain that they have a standard method of communicating location to a computer (edit: looked it up, its the NMEA standard). So, except for the aforementioned USB 1.1 vs. 2.0 issues, I think any receiver that supports the standard should work (but maybe wait until some have been tested with the Pandora first; I'm no expert on this).
 
Tempel said:
As for GPS receivers, I'm fairly certain that they have a standard method of communicating location to a computer (edit: looked it up, its the NMEA standard). So, except for the aforementioned USB 1.1 vs. 2.0 issues, I think any receiver that supports the standard should work (but maybe wait until some have been tested with the Pandora first; I'm no expert on this).
Son of a... I just wrote a huge reply and it got swallowed by Firefox refreshing the page for whatever reason. I really hate when that happens, especially because I don't know why it did it. I don't mind losing data when it was my own fault, but when it just happens for reasons unknown, it's a little disconcerting.


To summarize (because I want to get to bed) - NMEA is not a well-defined standard. NMEA is not the standard for communicating with the computer, it's just the protocol for packaging up the information itself. What you said wasn't incorrect, it just might be misinterpreted, so I thought I'd pipe in and clarify. The way a bluetooth GPS communicates with Linux is as a HID device, over a virtual COM port. Almost all bluetooth GPSes work this way. If you have one that works this way (basically it would be strange if you didn't) then you will just have to pair with the device and it will work. (it's actually not quite that simple, you have to do some configuration with RFCOMM and a couple of painful hoops, but you only have to do that once.)

The way the data itself is sent is typically NMEA but there are also binary formats that actually work better than NMEA (in that they're more rigidly standardized and are more logical than NMEA - NEMA has an insane amount of cruft from years of poorly-planned revisions - and it's also used for a lot of other communications methods (not just GPS) on ships so it has a lot of unnecessary functionality that just convolute the standard.) Most / all software written for Linux using GPSes will use GPSD, not directly process the NMEA sentences a GPS spits out (this is doable but the way NMEA is implemented differs with different chipsets, and as I said before, it's preferable to use the binary protocols in a lot of instances.) SO just make sure that the device you're buying uses a chipset supported by GPSD (preferably one with a binary mode supported by GPSD - you'll get more accurate data and faster updates that way, in most cases.)

I just bought a $25 gps adapter on ebay that I knew had binary mode support in GPSD and it works perfectly in Linux. Acquires satellites really fast and updates fast as well.

As far as nav software, I don't particularly like Navit. It has a lot of faults and all around feels very unpolished to me. I appreciate the effort the guys put into it and I know it's still alpha, but personally I don't think I'll be satisfied using it, and it's looking like it will be alpha for quite a while. I guess we'll see, I'm pretty early in the first batch (around 7-800) and I live in Texas (only about 3 hours from manufacturing facility), so I may be one of the first people to get a MP pandora (if they really can make/ship a few hundred a day), and I'll make a Youtube video with an evaluation of all the GPS options (as this is one of the many uses my Pandora will hopefully serve) probably on the first day I have it. I'll also write up a guide on how to set up GPS under Angstrom and with the software and all and post it on my website. I'm planning on writing a lot of Pandora guides actually.

Getting back to navit, I don't think they do turn-by-turn navigation or even have searchable addresses, so it's unlikely that will work unless you can look up the addresses beforehand and type in the coordinates, but in that case why not just print out Google Maps directions to the place you're going?

This isn't specifically directed at navit, but one of my main pet peeves with all GPS software I've used is UI design. They've all got pretty fast updating chips now as far as actual GPS coordinates go, but I have not to this day used any GPS software that I felt had even a passable UI. (Google Navigation is probably pretty good (Google and I generally have similar ideas regarding UI design) but I haven't had a chance to use it yet.) They almost all do stupid stuff that just makes me shake my head in frustration.

For example, suppose I want to go to to my friend's house. Now I live in a city (as most people do) and I typically travel to places in the city. Sometimes I'll go on road trips, sure, but for the most part, I'm typically navigating to places in the same city as me. So I go to the GPS program, and most of them will say "please enter the city" or "search all cities" after I click "route me". So I've already had to click once (to search all cities) or clicked a whole lot of times (to type in the city name). The problem with the "search all cities" is that it is typically poorly implemented and makes the subsequent search really slow, so most people end up doing the "enter city" option and typing in their current city (or entering the zip code, but that's still at least 7 clicks.) Now, what I would do (were I to design a GPS app) is... well, duh, we already know what city the user is in. So don't even have that screen. Start on whichever screen we would put AFTER that screen, and at the bottom of THAT screen, have a button that says "( Searching in Austin, TX. Click here to change.)" It's just as clear what you are doing and saves the user a click (or possibly many clicks.) And even though we say we are searching only in their city that doesn't mean we actually have to. When we do the actual location search, we simply search their city first and if it's not in the city, we throw up a button that says: "No results found in the current city. Searching surrounding cities... click here to change cities." And just... GASP!... do shit for them that they probably wanted to do anyway!

Another annoying thing some GPS software does is to ask you for the street name before it asks you for the street number. This is nice because, for example, some streets only have addresses in the range 100-900 so they can then enforce some checks for you, or some streets may only have addresses starting with 12xxx so they can go ahead and auto-enter 12xxx. The problem though is that people don't remember addresses in this order, we think "232 lexington blvd., Austin, TX, 78777" not "Texas, Austin 78777, Lexington blvd. 232". It's jarring and unnecessary. I would much prefer to just have one window where I enter "232 lexington blvd." and it will just intuit "Austin, TX" because that's where I am at the time, and if I want to specify a different city, heck, I can type in a different city name! I know what city I'm in and I know my destination city, and it knows what city I'm in. therefore, if AB = AC and we both know what A is, then B = C. I know that the reason they ask for data in a specific order is to decrease the order of magnitude of the search space in their database, but it really hampers my ability to use the software, and with some cleverness, they can have the same reduction in search space without making it such a grating experience for me.

I'm sure some GPS software has this particular issue fixed, but there are just a huge amount of ideas that can be implemented to fix the user experience in other ways that just never come to fruitation. I could go on and on about this but I'll stop there for now.

I guess I'll go ahead and say this, but please no one take this out of context or blow it out of proportion please... it's really nothing major.

I'm a developer/programmer (I'm in my last semester getting a Master's in Computer Science) and I've been writing a GPS navigation application specifically for the Pandora. I don't know if it will ever get done enough to see the light of day, but I have already done some preliminary work on it. I'm just waiting for my Pandora so I can ramp up development on it. It's probably going to be the application that's my main development focus when the Pandora ships. It may take me a very long time to come out with this, if ever, so don't get too excited, but I have a huge list of grievances on navigation software and I think I know how to fix all of them to provide a much more seamless and pleasant user experience. The study of Human-Computer Interaction and User Interface Design are my passions and I'm really excited to start. When I have the Pandy in my hands and I've restarted development on the software, I will create a thread where we can discuss more in detail some progressive ideas to hopefully make some really great software, but right now it's mostly just an idea and a couple hundred lines of code. I really do hope I have the time to get it working, because it seems to me that really fantastic GPS software is basically nonexistent under Linux. And I think this community is really something great, and I think you guys probably have a ton of ideas as well on how to improve upon the state of the art (which is fairly immature as far as I can tell.) Heck, if you guys weren't easily dissatisfied with commercial efforts being lackluster you wouldn't be ordering an independently-developed handheld in the first place, would you?

Of course I'll see if I can just contribute to NavIT if/when I resume development, but I don't completely agree with some of their design decisions (anytime thousand-line XML files come up I sigh) so I may end up continuing with the project I've started from scratch.


Wow, that didn't end up being much of a summary, did it? Turned out to be longer than the previous post. Anyway, good night, everyone. Let's all cross our fingers that the February 13th deadline is reached and the first thousand Pandoras ship soon!
 
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XPANSiVE said:
ThaDSman said:
It would be so hot if we could get the android version of Google Navigation running on he Pandora. I'd be the happiest man in the world :lol:

Well, Cpasjuste got Android working on the Pandora, and I'm no expert on this, but that might mean it'll work.
Google Navigation is not part of Android, it's a closed binary that Google includes on their phones for free. So unless another phone uses the same architecture it might not be portable (and even if it does, they might directly communicate with their GPS chip in binary mode or something, or make some assumptions on NMEA sentences, so it's unlikely to be portable) especially if using a different GPS chip than they used.
 
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rabidpoobear said:
HID device
FFFFUUUUUU-

I agree with everything else you just said.

:p
 
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Tom` said:
rabidpoobear said:
HID device
FFFFUUUUUU-

I agree with everything else you just said.

:p

What? HID devices too expensive for you? Well we can stop by the ATM machine if you want. Just don't forget your PIN number. ;)

[edit] in all seriousness, even though it's redundant, it's sometimes necessary to be understood (or at least to be clear).
 
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rabidpoobear said:
Getting back to navit, I don't think they do turn-by-turn navigation or even have searchable addresses, so it's unlikely that will work unless you can look up the addresses beforehand and type in the coordinates, but in that case why not just print out Google Maps directions to the place you're going?

It does both; it's far from a perfect implementation, the UI to get to it isn't easily discoverable and sometimes just fails, but it's getting better with each release.
 
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valhalla said:
rabidpoobear said:
Getting back to navit, I don't think they do turn-by-turn navigation or even have searchable addresses, so it's unlikely that will work unless you can look up the addresses beforehand and type in the coordinates, but in that case why not just print out Google Maps directions to the place you're going?

It does both; it's far from a perfect implementation, the UI to get to it isn't easily discoverable and sometimes just fails, but it's getting better with each release.
when'd they add searchable addresses? I read the release notes a few months ago and they didn't have it as far as I could tell. or maybe it was just that it's not smart on restricting the search space (it searches the whole planet?) I don't really remember, I just remember it striking me as odd and I couldn't figure out how to do it in the UI.
 
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Thanks a lot for all these new and extensive informations.
Greatly appreciated :D

I think I will consider the Bluetooth GPS receiver since it's easier and could also be used by my friends with Bluetooth Smartphone (always trying to reduce cost in such long trip).

Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia are not Tatooine. I went outside with my phone just five minutes ago and it didn't even get one bit of sand or extreme temperature on it.

Well, maybe I didn't plan to go visiting yard like yours were there is no sand or extreme temperature.

Tatooine shooted from Tunisia Tataouine city :
r2d2_tatooine.jpg

Nambug Australia :
pinnacles_desert,_nambung_national_park,_australia_-_800x600.jpg
 
rabidpoobear said:
when'd they add searchable addresses? I read the release notes a few months ago and they didn't have it as far as I could tell. or maybe it was just that it's not smart on restricting the search space (it searches the whole planet?) I don't really remember, I just remember it striking me as odd and I couldn't figure out how to do it in the UI.
Search by house number is still flakey, but you can search by city center, street, or point of interest.

edit: by flaky, I mean non-existent, just to clarify
 
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rabidpoobear said:
[..] then you will just have to pair with the device and it will work.
You don't necessarily have to pair it. With Maemo Mapper on my N800 I don't have to pair with the BT GPS, I just select the one I want to use (I have several GPS units) and it'll use it. Same with some of the GPS applications I have on my Palm PDA. On the other hand, TomTom on my Palm wanted to pair with the TomTom GPS. It did not need to pair with any non-TomTom GPS though, so it's very little hassle to use my Holux M1200 instead. And there's no additional hassle or config on either my Palm or my N800.

The problem though is that people don't remember addresses in this order, we think "232 lexington blvd., Austin, TX, 78777" not "Texas, Austin 78777, Lexington blvd. 232".
I think you'll have to replace 'people' with e.g. 'Americans', or whatever. Is it the same in e.g. UK? Where I live, and in lots of other countries in Europe it's always "Street name, Street number", often followed by "zip number, City" or some variation.
 
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