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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

That's very cool.

One time, I decided to just put the phone in my pocket and take my bike to a location. I had the ear buds in my ears, I thought, voice is enough...

Oh my, was I wrong. I ended up missing most turn off in streets due to latency, some crossings made no sense over audio, a total disaster.

So I got a stand to attach the phone to the handle bars... And that works great, for about 20 mins. I live in Australia and the heat of the sun on the phone + google maps using CPU will literally shut off the phone as it reaches 50C+... The phone just turns off on me as I approach the hard-part of the journey... Superb.

So now I just research it before leaving, mentally map it in my mind, look up street view for turn offs... Then I Yolo it all the way. When I finally admit I'm lost, I pull up, bring out the phone and start google maps then...

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Years ago before a long motorcycle trip I made a nice setup to use google maps while riding for the trip. A custom mount, ran all the charging cables, NFC tag and tasker profile so it knows when it's mounted.

I used it for 3 days before a guy told me to give old fashioned maps a try, and gave me a few state maps. My tank bag has a nice window slot for them, so why not use it in tandem?

Within 2 hours I had totally stopped paying attention to the gps and just went off the map. The next day I didn't even use the gps at all, and ended up using just maps for next 3 weeks riding around the country.

If the signage is good (in the US it's superb, people just don't pay attention to it/understand it) then I have found a regular old maps to be far superior. You can quickly see all info on the map (no dicking around with zoom/scrolling on the touchscreen) and you can adjust your route very easily on the fly.

Seriously, I cannot recommend paper maps enough. Take some time to understand how to read the map (if you're not sure already) and pay attention to road signs. The two integrate beautifully and make getting around easy. If you have a place to put it on your bike, give it a try.

I ride motorcycles in cross-Europe trips for fun but prefer the GPS. My GPS will look for small twisty mountain roads with lots of elevation changes and lots of corners. Roads that are only on highly detailed local maps, and I don't want to carry 30 maps on a month long road trip. Road signage is simply not a thing on these roads as they are only used by locals. I can disable highways, B-roads, toll, ferries and on my roadbikes I will disable gravel sections. It will tell me how many kilometers till the next gas-stations along the trip and warn me about speed traps. Not that I speed on purpose, but sometimes you are a couple of kms above the limit.

Especially on sections where I have to change direction every 300 to 500 meters I don't want to deal with reading a map. Voice navigation in my headset and an occasional quick glance at the screen is much safer than fiddling with a paper map.

I too ride motorcycles in Europe; I bought a special GPS device for motorbikes but it's not very good -- it's a Tom Tom, did you go with Garmin?

I have a Tom Tom Rider. I primarily use the "thrilling ride" option for A to B navigation, using the most aggressive setting for corners and elevation. My day starts out with picking a random place and the Tom Tom picks a scenic route for me. After doing this a couple of times I book a hotel and drive there. Repeat the next day.

Can you share what app/device you use that has all of those features like specifically picking out fun roads? I'm not aware of that feature on any major nav app.

I’ve found google maps offline mode + the avoid highways feature can have good results. It also tends to have shitty results in highly interconnected areas, but it works alright for the country.

Sounds like he's probably using a TomTom Rider - there's an option specifically to pick a scenic/fun ride between A and B.

You can try Kurviger -- it uses OpenStreetMap data and chooses "fun" curving routes using the Graphhopper routing engine.

https://kurviger.de/en

I use https://trips.furkot.com

Scenic (http://motomappers.com) is pretty good at finding out-of-the-way routes.

Garmin has that functionality on their moto-specific GPS units. I've used it on my BMW-branded Garmin a few times. It isn't going to find the equivalent to Deals Gap in North Dakota, but it does the best it can with what it's got to work with, i. e., if there's something with some curves, it will reliably favor that over a straight road.

>You can quickly see all info on the map (no dicking around with zoom/scrolling on the touchscreen)

DID YOU GET THAT, GOOGLE?

This is one of my biggest frustrations lately. I have a modern phone with a large, high-DPI screen, but Google (and most navigation apps I've tried) only wants to show me the sparsest map. Plus having to zoom insanely far in just to check the name of a road many times, or names disappearing arbitrarily during zooming...

Physical maps are infinitely better in the rain. Gloves+moisture is no fan of touchscreens. Get an old-fashioned handheld marine GPS if you have to. One with clicky buttons.

I used an inexpensive (2 gallon?) ziploc bag around my iPad on a day when I had the roof off my Jeep and we got several inches of rain.

Worked fine, even Touch ID was mostly usable, but I can't imagine what an unlaminated map would have looked like at the end of that storm.

There are maps on woven cotton. If the ink is waterproof, they work underwater. They aren't quite as thin though, at the same strength, due to the somewhat too regular bonding of the fibers (woven bundles vs. one big flat bundle).

Works well until you need to find an address in a city. Also, sometimes handy to be able to search for Mcdonalds, supermarket, fuel station etc.

Interstate and major highway signage in the US is really pretty good. And state/region level maps a great for getting around on them.

The main problem is, if I'm on a motorcycle trip I want to spend as little time on those roads as possible. It's difficult to manage enough maps to get at "the good stuff" on a long ride - but a decent GPS will get you details quickly, and deals well with the highly variable signage once you are on secondary highways and tertiary roads.

I think the best bet is a mix of both plus, for me, significant time spent in pure explore mode (no map at all). That's not for everyone I suppose but I've had some of my best travel days navigating by little more than the sun and major features.

That's how I do Europe/Alps. Paper maps are just awesome. Means your brain is fully engaged as well. Tank bags are definitely a great option.

Although I do admire setups where you don't have to look down as much. That was one big drawback of a tank-bag. Felt like coming up to an intersection/roundabout, if it wasn't obvious where to go, it was actually pretty tough to glance down, find your place on the map, interpret where to go, then translate that into real world 'I need to take the third exit'.

There are times when gmaps makes things way too easy.

I tried the same thing on my motorbike in London. I had a pretty cheap android phone at the time.

The 'headphone hearing protection' would make the volume too quiet to hear over the engine any time you jiggled the headphone jack. Required a screen interaction to fix.

Of course if you didn't hear the audio prompt or couldn't make it out precisely, you're on your own - no way to check it or get it to repeat if the phone's in your pocket.

Cheap rain-proof phone holders have a zip around the outside - so you can connect wired headphones or a charger - but not both, as they poke out different ends of the phone.

Wired headphones linking you to something linked to your bike make getting on and off complicated.

Motorbikes don't have standard cigarette lighters to plug a standard charger into. You'd have to mess with the bike's wiring to add a phone charger, so I went without.

The battery wasn't good enough to navigate a journey that was 60 minutes each way. Google Maps didn't offer any options like automatically turning off the screen on long straight roads.

Once your phone's in a waterproof holder and you're wearing motorcycling gloves, your touchscreen won't work. So you can't quickly cancel navigation to save battery (or dismiss the hearing protection warning) while stopped at some street lights.

All things considered, it was pretty clear the navigation experience wasn't designed for motorcycling.

Use Bluetooth helmet speakers for audio.

Most touring bikes, and many scooters have a cigarette lighter attachment point. My SH300 has one in the glove box. The 2016+ VFR800 has one. Etc.

Many better quality gloves have conductive tips on their forefingers for capacitive touchscreen usage these days. My Alpinestars SP8 gloves do.

I find Google Maps audio directions just barely acceptable for London navigation. I prefer my Garmin Zumo, but only use that if my destination is a long way off the big city-crossing roads I otherwise know reasonably well.

It comes with my when I have planned routes, rather than destinations, though. Google Maps is dreadful for planning a route with waypoints - it needs constant interaction at every stage.

Yes, many of my problems could have been at least partly solved by spending more money on a helmet with bluetooth, more money on a bike with a better battery and a phone power supply, more money on better gloves with special finger coating, more money on a phone with a better battery and better handlebar mounts available, and so on.

Sadly, as a student on a £300 motorbike, I didn't have the money for such luxuries :)

I have to disagree. I don't have a helmet with bluetooth. My bike has a standard battery. The phone power supply is a 10 euro part on eBay and 5 minutes of soldering. You don't need the gloves as you shoudln't be touching your devices while riding. The battery on my phone has 1500 loadcycles and plain sucks, but I have the 10 euro phone charger. And a handlebar mount is another 10 euro on eBay.

I guess I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing?

I said I couldn't hear audio directions, barrkel said a bluetooth helmet would have helped, I said maybe but I couldn't afford that, you say you disagree and your helmet doesn't have bluetooth - what are we disagreeing about?

That you need all those things you listed in your post. I do intercontinental trips without most of those things. You only need to invest 20 to 100 euro and about 30 minutes of your time to have proper navigation on your motorcycle.

Wireless Bluetooth earbuds cost about €10 and should fit even with a regular helmet.

If you have cheap earbuds that don't really seal out the other noise, this is a recipe for serious hearing damage.

Sealing out external noise when riding a bike is probably even more dangerous. Just keep the volume down and accept that sometimes it'll get drown out. Most apps repeat the directions anyway.

This is rather off topic, but does anyone understand how the cigarette lighter plug of all things managed to become more of an international standard than any other electrical outlet (with perhaps USB as an evolving exception)? It's baffeling to me..

Lazy attempt at providing some answers at least: https://www.lifewire.com/car-cigarette-lighter-12v-socket-53....

Excerpt:

Although they weren’t originally designed with this purpose in mind, car cigarette lighters provided an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up. Since the actual lighter portion was removable once the coil-and-reel version fell out of use, the receptacle itself provided easy access to power and ground. That allowed for the development of a power plug that could be inserted and removed with no need to permanently wire an accessory into the electrical system of a car.

The ANSI/SAE J563 specification was developed to ensure compatibility between cigarette lighter receptacles and 12V power plugs made by different manufacturers.

The simple answer is: smoking. Ubiquitous for quite some time and literally addicting. Now that everyone has Facebook on their phablets (arguably addicting) the market has met demand by adding USB ports.

Every car has had one since at least the 60s, and if you wanted easy access to 12VDC, that was your option. Step 2 is network effect, and now it's a "standard".

There were the Hella plugs [0] in old Volkswagens (our '81 Vanagon has one), looked much like a lighter plug but smaller, and a better design. But they never seemed to have caught on except on BMW motorcycles. In fact, whenever I hear a reference to them, they're called "BMW plugs" because that's the only thing that uses them anymore.

[0] http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/291040452525-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

Depends on the bike - touring bikes like my BMW and the big Triumphs have sockets, mine has the DIN socket and it's easy to get a USB adapter for it. Not exactly the perfect bike for London, but I did commute on it for a year or so, using a RAM mount with waterproof holder. My gloves had conductive fingertips but they stopped being conductive after a while. Meh. The old touchscreens worked better.

This. I've frequently been surprised by how useless the audio navigation is without being able to check the screen for clarity.

There just needs to be a "no visuals" setting where you get given much more audio information.

The worst experience I've had was riding in Slavic countries with just headphones in and realising after a few miles that GMaps couldn't pronounce the road names and so was just leaving a silence.

I'd get "Turn left on to ''". I thought the roads were numbered and I was constantly turning onto highway 2.

I find Google's audio cues to be bizarrely mistimed. I wrote navigation software for the PocketPC way back in '02, and my cues were more adaptive to approach speed.

Agreed. I've tried several times to use google maps with bluetooth headphones on my bike in London. Unlike in the states, the roads are never straight for very long and there are lots of roundabouts. If you take a wrong exit, it will recalculate a new path, but without seeing the screen you don't know you messed up. I found myself wanting positive and negative feedback via audio. "Take the third exit at the round about." "Good job" or "Turned to soon. Recalculating"

Hmm, I have found that where I live the voice only navigation is most of the time enough for me. It has the benefit that I can turn off the display which saves battery, the phone is protected in my jacket pocket and I have one less distraction in my cockpit to look at (really I just want to keep my eyes peeled at the traffic)

> So now I just research it before leaving, mentally map it in my mind, look up street view for turn offs... Then I Yolo it all the way. When I finally admit I'm lost, I pull up, bring out the phone and start google maps then...

This is by far the best way I've found to use mapping apps while riding. Setting aside the heat issue, GPS apps require more concentration than I like to give them while riding. It's a lot easier to check other vehicles rear view mirrors, judge intent of drivers, and just generally keep your head on a swivel without a GPS to look at.

I have found that for the occasional reminder, my Apple watch's taps work well (can't see my watch though, so you gotta remember which taps are which for left/right).

I recently saw a pitch from a startup that have a gadget [1] designed to address exactly the problems you talk about and might be worth a look (disclaimer: I have no relationship with the company but I do cycle a lot and thought their product looked promising). The debate amongst the investors afterwards was interesting, once the startup had left the room. The investors who didn't cycle/motorbike were sceptical and couldn't understand why a mobile phone wasn't good enough for this whereas the investors who had some cycling experience were mostly positive about the product.

[1] https://beeline.co/

This looks really cool. Especially liked the compass mode.

That's very interesting. One of my current peeves is watching for the next turnoff with various GPS apps. I have to rotate my whole head down to see, since my phone is currently mounted to my motorcycle handlebars[1], and the turn icons are usually small and vague.

The reality is that I want detailed maps for route planning and local exploration, but very simple maps for the actual navigation part.

I use a Garmin Edge 520 mounted on my bike (bicycle). It doubles as my fitness-logger so I'm not suggesting anyone buys it just for some maps, but I really like it.

It's not as smooth as using a phone when it comes to maps, but for preplanned routes it works great. It has made 4-6 hour bike-rides on unknown roads much easier. No more stops at intersections to struggle with the phone to see where to go, can just keep the speed up looking at the display once in a while. The display is also very easy to read in sunlight.

The newly released Edge 520 Plus builds a bit on that, as it comes with maps for your region pre-loaded (region as in e.g. Europe, or US). This allows it to do point-to-point routing on the fly, as well as rerouting if you miss a turn. I bought it a few weeks ago and am super happy with it.

Yeah, I've avoided mounting a phone to bike here in Aus yet, but could see how easily heat and using gmaps would fry the phone to the point of shutdown.

I've managed to drive/ride and just listen to voice which worked well enough for directions.

Mostly though, I'd love gmaps to be optimised for finding me the 'fun' roads. Sort of a bestbikingroads algorithm that lets me find the few twisties in between where I am, and my destination, even if it's quite a detour.

I use this [1] for attaching phone to handle bars, it's completely waterproof, has a small hole for cable, so you can charge your phone during a ride. I also had a lot of problems with Google Maps on a motorcycle and bike. I switched to OsmAnd [2] once you learn how to use it (it has 100s of settings and built-in profiles) it will be your only and best satnav you ever used. Just checkout their plugins and settings, thing like offline wikipedia for tourist attractions, mountain peaks are great features. OsmAnd combines GM and TravelAdvisor, but it's had to use at the beginning.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Motorcycle-Holder-Handlebar-...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand&hl=...

Oh yes, the heat.

We're going to a friend's place in a different city, more than an hour away. My SO is driving, I'm navigating. Just as we're about to enter the city and start the most complex part of the drive, my phone dies. Turns out, the constant glare of the sun + rubber casing + the already absurd heat generated by Google's navigation overheated the phone. We had to stop for a moment, let it cool down, and only then could continue.

My takeaway from that experience is that on long trips, I now only engage navigation in the important areas, and take off the rubber casing when driving in warm weather.

TomTom app for iPhone works wonderfully when you'd like to navigate just by voice commands. I've navigated through Paris during rush hours without single mistaken turn just by listening to the phone :D

Experienced the heat issue when we did Vietnam South to North on a bike some months ago. Phone got so hot you couldn't touch it. Had to wing it in the end and stop every now and then to see how lost we were.

I thought that Vietnam, outside of the larger cities, was fairly easy to navigate.

Conveniently for me it was raining the whole time, so overheating wasn't an issue. Rather, I had the opposite where I almost froze riding through the rain in Đà Lạt wearing only tshirt and shorts.

It is for the most part. I only had a little candy-bar SonyEricsson at the time which had really limited interweb capabilities. Other guys had iPhones, but for the most part, winging it was great and got you where you needed to go.

I found Vietnamese people were usually happy to help you out if you needed to find something.

When I got a flat tyre, I just stopped near a local, pointed to my flat tyre, and they gestured directions to get to a mechanic (not that they're hard to find in Vietnam).

I'd imagine it would be the same if you only had a paper map with your destination. Just show the map to a local and in no time they'd tell you where you are and the best way to get there.

Outside of the touristic areas, Vietnamese people are generally really nice and helpful people, who don't try and rip you off. I needed to get the front shocks replaced on my bike. The mechanic next to the hostel wanted something like 800,000 dong to replace them, so I declined. Later, my shocks blew out in Da Nang and I actually had to get them replaced. The mechanic, who couldn't speak word of English, did them for me for 400,000 dong without even haggling. I'm fairly sure that's the local price, because I can't imagine it's possible to get two shocks, plus an hour of labour for under US$20, back home the same job would cost me probably $200 at least.

Haha yes I was quite happy to go down the mountain after Đà Lạt. I didn't expect it to be that cold. But yes, once out in the rural areas it becomes a lot easier to get around.

I designed a device with an 8" e-ink display recently. I thought it wouldn't be too hard to repurpose it to have it display rendered maps tiles for your current location, using the built-in GPS module. If you could send the device a GPX/KML file over bluetooth, it could plot it over the tiles, and you'd have a simple, robust setup. Searching, entering text etc. are best done on a device with a good input mechanism and data connection, anyway.

I went on holiday to an area I used to drive a lot before navigation devices, there I realised how much more relaxed I am if I didn't use it. So I tried to go back to studying routes before my drive and only having a device as a backup plan and discovered it generally makes me more relaxed especially when there are other people being distracting in the car.

I try to do the same even while driving. It's a good brain exercise and helps ensure that I'll actually remember the route.

>I live in Australia and the heat of the sun on the phone + google maps using CPU will literally shut off the phone as it reaches 50C+

Get a better maps app, there's an abundance of them. Google Maps for mobile is just a resource hog with a shitty UI.

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