Garmin Birdseye

[caughtatwork]

Please be advised that we don't permit discussion of "how to" hack commercial (or even free) software.

I understand no one has done this, but with two posts including the work "hack" (which I acknowledge has more than one meaning) I just wanted to point out that discussions of "how to" will result in your post being moderated.

[Mr Router]

hack is a word over used, lol and hey you dont have to h@ck free software h@ck is an over "exploited" term these days

[squalid]

Hack is good.
Crack is bad (on more than one level).

[rediguana]

As one of the people that got slapped over the wrist for using the naughty hack word, let me try to bring this kinda back on topic.

What I think would be useful, is seeing if there is a way to convert free imagery into tiles using the same mechanism that provides BirdsEye. Whilst I haven't poked around, I think that a different approach is taken to loading and storing BirdsEye imagery when compared to Custom Maps. I think Custom Maps are designed for small areas, e.g. parks, whilst the approach to BirdsEye is a much wider tile based system that works at multiple zoom levels.

It would be very interesting to be able to take existing free imagery and be able to produce free imagery in addition to commercial. I'm probably going to contact Garmin about this as I am interested in the post-disaster imagery use case for getting very recently flown imagery of disaster affected areas into Garmin units. Of course using the BirdsEye online approach may not be viable, hence an offline means of producing and loading the imagery is required.

The whole approach being not too different to third party maps on Garmin.

[phillipsart]

I've actually found the quality worse than what I see on Google Earth. Colours are washed out and image quality very poor in my area. I've since purchased a Twonav Sportiva GPS unit just for these type of maps, I can add papermaps and digital maps as well as aerial images.

[phillipsart]

I have written a tutorial on Custom Maps for a soon to be released GPS Magazine for australia. and it's all free using paper maps or Nearmaps. Mag should be out in a month.

[Shael6636]

I am already testing Mobile Atlas using Nearmap Images for my garmin Dakota 20. I will let you know how well it works once i have tested it

[jyetara]

They have now reduced the download area from around 300mb down to 74mb which is a pain! On the plus side, it appears download times are very slightly improved...

This is still pretty pathetic for a paid service...