Exact turn-by-turn navigation

[Timmie Smet]

I use this app now for about a week, and it’s really great. The only feature I am missing is the ability to add and/or calculate turn-by-turn instructions to a predefined route/track.

Of course, this app supports turn-by-turn instructions when you select one starting point and one ending point. But in that way, you have only limited control on what happens in between. Surely, you can drag certain points to go to a specific street, but it’s close to impossible to follow a route exactly (!) the way you want.

I normally use a Garmin Edge 800 for bike navigation. In Garmin Mapsource (or Basecamp), you can create (draw) a route and save it as a gpx-file. Saving it as a route actually means to save all the via-points (in Mapsource, every time you click on the map to extend your route, you place a via point). Then I upload this to my GPS (still as a route). Before I start riding, the GPS calculates the route-to-follow (necessary, because the GPX-file only contains the via points, including start and finish). This usually results in a route that is slightly different than the one I prepared on my computer on Mapsource. The route will pass through all the via points, but the pieces in between can be somewhat different. Why is this, you might wonder? Well, the Edge 800 is only one of many devices that Mapsource supports, and that means that ways of calculation might differ from device type to device type, and… differ from Mapsource (also, computer-based software usually offers much more settings on how to navigate).

So sometimes, the actual routes were a little different than first intended. Sometimes, they were longer, and sometimes, there were many unpaved roads that I initially wanted to avoid. And when you want to follow a real-world route while following sign boards with arrows, you might want to have the route on Pocket earth exactly (!) right…

I quickly figured that, if I wanted to go around this problem, I had to vastly increase the number of via points in my route, in such a way that there is only one way to navigate from one via point to the next (e.g. from the beginning of a short street to the end). I sorted out this problem by converting my created route into a track by using a third party tool called WinGDB3 (this however requires a gdb-file as input: a garmin data base, but Mapsource is free software, so…).

To give an idea: my predefined 60 kilometre routes usually contain about 30 to 40 via points. Converting to a track with WinGDB3 adds via points, resulting to little over one Thousand via points. Ok, the resulting GPX-file will be slightly larger, but my Edge 800 calculates the route (and thereby buffering the turn-by-turn instructions) exactly the way I pictured it.

Some screenshots:

• A route made in Mapsource (using free OpenStreetMap maps!):
• The above route, converted with WinGDB3 into a track (notice the increased amount of points):
• Free Garmin Training Center: to review your rides (notice the graphs at the bottom):
• WinGDB3: conversion tool: I use option 11 to convert a route into a track:

So to make a very long story short: getting turn-by-turn instructions by means of an in-app calculation of a route based on a predefined track would make this app even more top class!

[Nomae]

I have the same need. I want to create a specific route and follow it exactly.

So far it seems to me that using the Control Points is a fairly easy way to make a custom route and in my one ride it seemed to work perfectly. If you are clever about where you put the control points you can minimize the number you have to add.

I’d like to know how to import a GPX file so it shows up as a route and not tracks simply because working on my pc to create the route is easier than on my iPhone. I’ve been using RouteConverter and Mapquest.com but so far haven’t figured out how to make my exports work in PE.

I look forward to giving PE more tests. I’d been using MapQuest which is easy to create routes but the second you get off track or it decides there is too much traffic on your chose route it immediately reroutes you on the shortest way to your destination.

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