TomTom Navigator Custom POIs... nearly there!!

Falkien · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 48

I've been meaning to have alook at the Favourtives POI file on the Palm for a while now and I finally got 30mins to have a play.

The file for each map set is stored on the plam as a database (.pdb) and has the filename of the map with the extension .cfg

e.g the 'GB Navigator Map' Favourites file is stored as

'GB Navigator Map.cfg.pdb' under palmOS

I used a file manager program on the Palm (e.g. Filez or FileProg) to copy this to a SD card and from there to the PC to view/edit with a Hex Editor

This file is created when TomTom is run for the first time, even when no Favs are set it produces an 'empty file' I used this empty file to compare against a file with one favourite and took a gues at where the co-ordinates may be...

I got lucky first time and managed to move the little Star a few miles south ! Mr. Green

In "Major_Roads_Of_Europe Navig.cfg" I changed two bytes starting at offset 0x7c which appears to be part of the Northings data

I think it should be possible to write a program external to TomTom that manages Favourite POIs thus giving a limited but useful ability to use all of that lovely POI data that people have contributed to PocketGPS World
Anyone good at Palm programming care to try?

I'm just attempting now using 'Par' <http://www.djw.org/product/palm/par/> to manipulate the palm database header to allow me to use my GB Navigator maps with my Major Roads of Europe map....

will let you know how I get on

Dave Mr. Green

/is quite exited/

Falkien · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 48

It Worked!
Using Par I changed the .pdb header information of my GB map Favourites to correspond to the MRE Map and I now have all of my Favourites in that map set too :D

Dave

Falkien · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 48

On a Roll.....

Just copied over POI data from another map set into the MRE directory on the card and the POIs poped up onthe map ;-)

Now if I can figure out the POI.DAT format I could make my own Confused

Dave

T3user · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jun 22, 2004 Posts: 10

Keep up the good work Falkien, We can only hope that some computer wiz will be able to help you. Thumbs Up

Mr-B · Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 5:34 pm Post subject:

Chief Simpleton here Wink

Can someone explain (in slightly less technical terms) what has been achieved?

I understood that Custom POIs (like the Speed Camera database, and as used on the PPC version of Navigator) weren't possible on Navigator 4 for Palm due to the fact that PalmOS 5 wasn't multi-tasking and a separate app needed to be running in the background.

Marvin · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 31, 2004 Posts: 6

Okay I'll try....

Basically the Palm version of TT Navigator 3 has only one way of adding places or POIs to the map, via the Favourites (The Yellow Star icons)
You can then use these to navigate to and from and center the map

The only way at present to add, remove, rename these POIs is via the TT navigator interface. This causes problems such as..

I want to save my Favourites in case of loss or damage to the Palm

I want to use the same favourites on another map set e.g. partial map versus full map of GB (At present each map has it's own seperate favourites and it's a pain to go through the searchand add them all again)

I #LURVE# McDonnalds and want all of their resturants in the country in my Favourites so that I can plan my route via each one in turn.

What the experiments show is that it seems possible to take POIs e.g. location and description and create a Favourites entry in a form that TT Nav for Palm will load and use within the program

Copying the Favourites from one map to another works with a little bit of manipulation so that I now have my Favourites from the GB map useable in MRE map

TTFN

Dave

Ruffman · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 24, 2004 Posts: 5

Now if I can figure out the POI.DAT format I could make my own "

Dave have you had any luck with this yet, I would like to try and help if I can. I've not used any palm dev software yet but have programmed in several other languages so I should pick it up quickly.

My end game is to have a list of LPG (Gas) stations in the POI database that I can navigate to when I need to refill the car (thirsty Landrover :D) oh and the speed cam bit would be handy too. Twisted Evil

Regards Tal.

luycksm · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 12:48 am Post subject:

I'm interested in editting the poi.dat as many ov2's make ttm on a 6600 stutter.
I found a way to extract poi.dat at a french site with the tool at http://www.licour.com. This works indeed, try it yourself. All the credits to the writer of the perl scripts extract_ttpoi.pl and merge_ttpoi.pl.
Unfortunately the merge_ttpoi doesn't do what i expected.

I'm not a perl programmer, but the code in 'extract_ttpoi.pl' reveals the structure of the underlying poi.dat file. Is anybody able to modify the perl script 'extract_ttpoi.pl' so it can merge a new poi.dat from a few source ov2's or asc's?

Your help would be very appreciated!

Greetzz, Marty

lbendlin · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 1:44 am Post subject:

Wow, an excellent find! This should give us something to chew on. Let's have a look at those perl scripts... Thumbs Up

_________________
Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

luycksm · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 12:40 pm Post subject:

lbendlin,

Yeah, I was surprised too when I found the link. We're really close to converting ov2's en asc's to poi.dat now.

Will you let me know when you found a way to do that?

Maybe I can build a nice GUI for this porcess then, so we have a tool we can use next to poiedit.

Greetzz, Marty.

Falkien · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 48

Good find!

Sorry for not posting anymore info on the original thread

I gave up on figuring out the file format as I had got 'distracted' by work :-(
and then read about the new version 4.4 of navigator which solved my custom POI problem

When I get some more spare time I'll have a look at it

Dave

lbendlin · Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 3:09 pm Post subject:

luycksm · Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 4:01 pm Post subject:

Lutz,

Sounds good, i started the same conversionprocess in JAVA yesterday. But it is difficult for me cause I'm not really familiar with perl.
I'm familiar with VBA as well, so your conversion of the perl script will be very useful to me.

About userinterface:
I already figured out that we can only use about 62 predefined categories. So I could build a form in which we can edit poi's for every category and build a poi.dat with the touch of a button.

Please keep me informed 'bout your progression and sorry for my poor english...

Greetzz, Martijn.

lbendlin · Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:15 am Post subject:

Quick update: I can extract all the categories, and seem to be able to retrieve POIs from each category file. Still need to do the b-tree decoding of the POI descriptions and need to fix the recursive calls. Once that is done and all POIs are extractable we'll need to focus on the reverse - how to pack the stuff back together.

This is fun ;-)
_________________
Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

luycksm · Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 11:54 pm Post subject:

Lutz,

You seem to be doing an excellent job. I'm stuck earlier in the process, I', only able to retrieve the categories, but the b-tree decoding is too much for me. But don't worry, you're not alone... I'll publish my findings as soon as I can...
Imagine we could do this job... We could so some business when we produce a nice GUI with it...

Greetzz, Marty.

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