Kieren’s Website

I bought my dad a satnav for Christmas and I was so impressed with it that I decided to go and buy one for myself too. After buying the forerunner, I decided to stick with Garmin - a well respected name in the GPS world. I bought myself a StreetPilot c510 for a bargin £79 from PCWorld. Even better is that with a little hacking, you can add features that more expensie models would have for free

With the unit I get maps for the UK and Ireland. I thought it would be cool to have maps for Europe incase I ever feel like driving over there but that idea was shattered when I saw the price - Gamin wants £100 for Europe maps and even maps on a per coutry basis run quite high. Garmin, Tomtom et al all use maps from the same 3rd parties - either Navteq or [add later] and as such there is little to differentiate the satnav products on the market unless you want fancy voices like yoda or the ability to view photos or other features that take us in the PDA realm.

All I want is mapping and with a little bit of googling, I found an opensource mapping project. Free maps ready to convert for your GPS device.  The Open Street Map project will let you download any section of the map and convert it for use with your GPS navigation device. With a bit of hunting around, you can even find ready to download sections. I tested maps of France which worked quite well and then went on to download the whole world. When people say it’s a small world, it really is - once the file is expanded it fits onto a 2GB SD card! As yet, I haven’t been able to get this to work on my garmin though becuase the converting program keeps crashing (runs out of memory I think) so I might have to add the World country by country. There’s a guide here if you want to try yourself.

The next free adition involves hacking the Garmin a little to add “text to speech” (TTS) ability which is seriously cool.  As stock my Garmin will only speak directions like “turn left at next junction” etc.  With TTS, the Garmin will read street names so instructions will be like “turn left into great west road”. It’s really awesome and means you don’t have to look at the screen so much, so safer too.

It wont work with the very latest firmware so don’t upgrade right out of the box and then just requires you to download vioce files from Garmin, remove the first 60 bytes, make a copy and name it 000.NEW, reboot and viola! You now have really cool TTS.  You can find a full guide to do that here.