Free Canada Topo Maps for Garmin GPS

[+ibycus]

Hope no one minds the cross post from the Canada forum, but it kind of belongs here too.

 

I've built a bunch of Topo Maps compatible with Garmin GPSrs. You can download them from http://www.ibycus.com/ibycustopo/TopoMaps.msi

[hippy-bob]

Hope no one minds the cross post from the Canada forum, but it kind of belongs here too.

 

I've built a bunch of Topo Maps compatible with Garmin GPSrs. You can download them from http://www.ibycus.com/ibycustopo/TopoMaps.msi

I have tried to open your maps and am having trouble. my computer does not recognize. can you suggest anything? Edited November 3, 2007 by hippy-bob

[+ergomaniac]

I have downloaded and installed the maps from the link you provided but there isn't any coverage in western BC in the download. The mapping installed as version 1.0 but I have seen other posts regarding version 1.1. Is there an updated download that covers a bit of the west coast? I have downloaded and installed one of your west coast map tiles from MapCenter that covers an area I'm interested in but I was hoping for an "all in one" install of the areas you have compiled.

 

Very nice work, keep them coming!!

[henry99]

OK I give up, how do I open or what program does .img link to.

 

Thanks

[+ibycus]

Oops forgot about this thread.... Most of the discussion is going on on the Canada forum.

 

The latest version is available on http://www.ibycus.com/ibycustopo (version 1.1). 1.1 has significantly expanded coverage over the old version. If you download and install it, you can load the maps to your GPS with mapsource. If you don't have mapsource, you can use sendmap, available on http://www.cgpsmapper.com.

[+911turbos]

I downloaded these maps last week and when I tried to view them in my program GPSTurbo it couldn't recognize them, but it was a simple fix as I was parsing the FAT table incorrectly.

 

I've totally re-written my IMG map renderer and it now looks more like google street maps with the anti-aliased fat curved edges for the roads and such but when viewing your maps I was noticing a weird rendering glitch on a lot of the cul-de-sac ends. Turns out that a fair number of street poly lines in the map data have duplicate points in them. Typically it is a single road line piece but the end point is duplicated. I'm not sure if this is a "feature" of the IMG format, can a polyline have only one line or is there a minimum of two? Anyway, it was a simple fix to ignore duplicate points. The reason for bringing it up though is that if the duplicate point is not a limitation of the format, then you could save a few bytes here and there by stripping these out of the dataset.

 

Cheers,

Kevin Pickell

[SiliconFiend]

I downloaded these maps last week and when I tried to view them in my program GPSTurbo it couldn't recognize them, but it was a simple fix as I was parsing the FAT table incorrectly.

 

I've totally re-written my IMG map renderer and it now looks more like google street maps with the anti-aliased fat curved edges for the roads and such but when viewing your maps I was noticing a weird rendering glitch on a lot of the cul-de-sac ends. Turns out that a fair number of street poly lines in the map data have duplicate points in them. Typically it is a single road line piece but the end point is duplicated. I'm not sure if this is a "feature" of the IMG format, can a polyline have only one line or is there a minimum of two? Anyway, it was a simple fix to ignore duplicate points. The reason for bringing it up though is that if the duplicate point is not a limitation of the format, then you could save a few bytes here and there by stripping these out of the dataset.

 

Cheers,

Kevin Pickell

Could it have been data from the different layers?

[+ibycus]

I downloaded these maps last week and when I tried to view them in my program GPSTurbo it couldn't recognize them, but it was a simple fix as I was parsing the FAT table incorrectly.

 

I've totally re-written my IMG map renderer and it now looks more like google street maps with the anti-aliased fat curved edges for the roads and such but when viewing your maps I was noticing a weird rendering glitch on a lot of the cul-de-sac ends. Turns out that a fair number of street poly lines in the map data have duplicate points in them. Typically it is a single road line piece but the end point is duplicated. I'm not sure if this is a "feature" of the IMG format, can a polyline have only one line or is there a minimum of two? Anyway, it was a simple fix to ignore duplicate points. The reason for bringing it up though is that if the duplicate point is not a limitation of the format, then you could save a few bytes here and there by stripping these out of the dataset.

 

Cheers,

Kevin Pickell

 

Are these occuring at any particular place on the tiles? (edge vs middle). Is it restricted to road features?

If at the edge, it could conceivably be something in my parsing routines. If scattered, I'm guessing its something in the line generalization routines used by cgpsmapper.

 

**edit to add, by edge of tile I mean edge of NTS grid, in larger tiles, there will be 16 tiles per file.

Edited June 11, 2008 by ibycus

[+911turbos]

I haven't done an exhaustive search but it seems to be that it can happen anywhere and it seems to be only happening on road polylines that have only 1 segment, it seems to add a duplicate point to make it two segments.

Kevin

[+911turbos]

I've got GPSTurbo now rendering your maps just fine. They are WAY more detailed than any of the other Canadian maps that I have but of course without the street names. Just curious if adding street names is on your to-do list or is there some technical problem with having the street names in the maps. Also it seems like there are not multiple "Levels of Detail" when zooming way out, is that also something that can be added?

 

Here is an image of GPSTurbos new IMG Map renderer ( Showing City Select N/A v7):

 

Cheers,

Kevin

[+Red90]

The "good" free data that is available does not include names. The free data that does have names is not very accurate. If this changes, then names can be added.

 

http://www.ibycus.com/ibycustopo/

The road data comes from the GeoBase® website. This data at the moment does not have road names or address information, but the positional accuracy is very good (as compared to the StatsCan data set, which has road names and addresses, but poor accuracy)

 

There are three levels of data, 0, 1 and 2. It is difficult to make more levels as the amount of road classification in the data set that is used is quite small. There is no classification on water feature data so it is even harder to separate. Make sure you are updated to version 1.5

 

BTW, Kevin, when I tried a version of your program last week, it was crashing on the Calgary Area Trail maps.

[+911turbos]

I just posted a updated version today, if it is still crashing then please email me the data and I will fix it asap.

 

With regard to the Geobase data, at the URL below mentions road names, is this different data than he is using?

 

http://www.geobase.ca/geobase/en/data/nrn/description.html

 

http://code.google.com/p/gpsturbo/

 

Cheers,

Kevin

[+Red90]

I just posted a updated version today, if it is still crashing then please email me the data and I will fix it asap.

 

Just tried and it does not crash now. The new rendering looks really good.

 

As to the data, Ibycus will need to answer as I have not look at all the available data in detail myself.