Reintroduction of Thin .typfile and adaptions for Garmin edge x40 firmware bugs.

Garmin recently released a very buggy new firmware for edge 1040, 840 and 540. There are two huge problems with this new firmware (21.x) concerning map rendering. All maps published June 02 or later are therefore adapted.

a) Layout in the maps is defined via a .typ file. In this typfile there are two ways to define how streets should render. One is by setting two colours, one for the line and one for the border. And the other is by using two colours and creating a simple bitmap (32x32px). Likely to increase contrast or whatever Garmin decided to render the border in 4x the width that is defined in the .typfile. This doesn’t affect most of their modern maps as they only used a line color without border – but in many older maps Garmin also uses a border colour. Now it sounds like the obvious solution to just switch to bitmap instead of line/border – but the problem is that most garmin devices render bitmap lines different and it looks worse. As I believe that about half of my users use the openmtbmap/velomaps with Garmin edge devices I decided to remove the borders and render most streets […]

New Contourlines for Europe – and other recent news

The next map updates – coming over this weekend will include new contourlines. Actually I updated the contourlines already over the last few months for quite a few countries – but this was only for countries with integrated contourlines. So the next map update of countries like Spain, Norway, Turkey, Europe continent will require an update of the contourlines as well. Note that it can be temporarily for a few hours (up to 16 hours in case of Europe continent map, max 13-14 hours for other maps) that only the new contourlines are online, but the map that belongs to it is not updated yet.

 

The next Picture shows the coverage of LIDAR DEM sources in my maps after the update (picture by the creator of the DEM files https://sonny.4lima.de/ ). It’s the first time for quite a few eastern European countries to have LIDAR DEM data and first update for many parts in Italy as well as other countries. LIDAR DEM sources usually mean that the error in altitude is less than 2-3m even in forest (showing the altitude on the ground, while satellite sourced DEM sources usually have rather the altitude a bit below tree […]