Messages

@Max   External battery capacity ?  Phone battery capacity ?  And out of juice after 5 hours ?  Arrows ? An example Screenshot picture ?  Or do you mean those Navigation track arrows ?
See:  http://forum.locusmap.eu/index.php?topic=4178.msg32090#msg32090

5200 mAh / ~1400 mAh / yes, maybe 6...

About the arrows... Usually an imported gpx track looks like the shown in picture 1. When I place the crosshair onto the track, it looks like shown in picture 2 (red arrows indicating the direction of the track). I would like to see those red arrows all of the time, so I know which way to go.

I eventually gave up on trying to use all of these navigation features. Instead I attached an external battery to my phone so I can keep my screen turned on for about 5 hours, and simply use the guiding feature.   

However, I follow downloaded MTB-tracks that often intersect themselfs. So, I need to see the direction of the track. When I move the map manually on the touchscreen and point the red crosshair on the track, arrows indicate the track direction. Is it possible to display those arrows all of the time while beeing guided along the track?

@Max: "always on" is not a solution even with external battery. I tried this...

And i would prefer a more clever solution than adding nav instructions to track manually...
Working with angles can be nice idea.

Declaring this as a request will happen on next weekend.

The battery thing was just a joke, as it is not really the solution we are looking for But with my old HTC desire and my 5200 mAh external battery I can actually go for approx. 4 h, which is enough for me.

The angle thing won't work realiably, because there will be a lot of curves which are not really turns, but still have a lower angle than some actual turns. For example, imagine a Y-junction which you enter from the one-road-side. The track will be almost straight through that junction and so it won't be recognized as a turn unless you lower the angle criterion so much that your phone will be constantly beeping everytime you follow a slightly curved track.
The only way an automated generation can work, is by using underlying map data to evaluate if there is a turn. But thats probably hard to implement.

Coming back to the manual notifications that you can add in gpsies... I just opened one of my gpx tracks that I generated on gpsies.com in oruxmaps. The additional turning informations which are actually GPX-Waypoints are shown on the map. So it seems that a GPX track can have additional GPX waypoints in it and they are somehow distinguished from the other trackpoints that make up the route.

I have the perfect solution: I bought another mount for my additional 5200 mAh Battery and this way I can keep the display on all of the time

@menion:
I agree with Joachim that the Navigation feature is not really applicable for mountainbike purpose because it does not recognize turns in the right way.

However, I think that a small change to the Guiding feature could make it useful for mountainbikers who want to follow a track. There are are websites like the german gpsies.com. They let you create/modify gpx files and you can add "turning notifications" at certain points. So if the guiding feature could recognize those "turning notifications" and just wake the display up/beep on those points and not on all waypoints, this would probably satisfy most mountainbikers.
To implement such a feature, the track format will somehow have to support different type of waypoints or some additional data, to distinguish regular waypoints and turning points. I have no clue, if gpx supports that kind of information.

This way, you would have to modify the downloaded gpx tracks before following them. But I guess an automatic navigation based on the angle between waypoints will never get satisfactory results for the kind of tracks you follow by mountainbike.

@Joachim:

This leads me to the following scenario:
If I want to follow a track with the mountainbike I choose openandromap with MTB theme in Locus.
Than I add an new route within Locus following the loaded GPX track. This is 20min additional work, but I get a clean track on the paths and I get turn instructions only when I need them.

I am also interested in what you mean by that. Probably a similar thing that I described... modifying a gpx track by adding manual turn notifications.. just in locus and not on a third party website. But its just a fictional scenario, so you cannot do that by now, right?

Sorry for posting in this old thread. Is there anything new concerning this topic?

I want to use Locus for the same purpose as Christian: Downloading mountainbike gpx tracks and following them. I bought Locus because I was told Locus was able to turn on the display when there is a significant change in direction of the track. However... either there are no notifications at all, or it is beeping all the time.

What I had in mind was that maybe the Guiding algorithm could evaluate the angle between the the lines connection the previous and current track point and the current and the upcoming point. And when the angle between those lines is significantly smaller than 180 degrees, this is considered a turn and the user could be notified. But I am absolutely no expert on this...

So another question: I used the website gpsies.com to edit tracks. There is an option to add "turning notifications" to the track. Is there a way to let Locus use those notifications? I tried exporting the track with added turning notifications as GPX route file. But it did not seemed that Locus did not use those notifcations. Is there maybe a way to let Locus use them. This would be a workaround for me and probably for a lot of other mountainbikers who want to follow tracks.