OpenMapChest is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

OpenMapChest is shutting down

openmapchest.org

57 pointscf100clunk15 comments

My Garmin use case is cycling and as recent as five years ago I was a happy user of various OSM based alternative maps. But even then, Garmin themselves had already switched their cycling devices to an OSM base, mostly giving up on the add-on map upselling business they had. These days, they hardly even try, as in the manual and packaging makes no mention of the fact that you could spend more money if you wanted. And their in-house OSM repackaging has become much pepper over the years, mostly related to how early versions were super stingy with geometry LOD, either for saving storage or for saving rendering cycles. Third party OSM were much nicer back then, but now there is very little reason to go the custom map route (unless you travel one of their two or three geo regions, which for some reason would still rewrite the paid download which they refuse telling you about, or somevof the easily available third party maps).

What I'm trying to say: it's hardly surprising if more and more of the people who ran a Garmin alternative hobby move on.

Does this need to be a service? If it's simply repackaging OpenStreetMaps for Garmin GPS devices, wouldn't a downloadable application be better?

Edit: Looking at https://www.openmapchest.org/about/ it seems he's just doing what's described at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/help/How_to_creat...

I don't own a Garmin device, but based on these instructions it does indeed look like this service turns OSM maps into Garmins proprietary format, with pre-compiled maps available.

There's probably some manual work going on behind the scenes given the limited storage space available on smart watches, but I agree that releasing the conversion tool would be better.

Still, maps take up a huge amount of storage space and a centralised download location for this stuff makes it easier for everyone to just share them over bittorrent. If everyone used the tool, they'd all hit some OSM tile server with some massive requests (sometimes downloading an entire country) every time they'd update the map.

You and me could probably use mkgmap to generate our own maps, bbut the majority of smart watch users won't be. There's value to these centralised services in that the end user doesn't need to k ow much more than how to download a file and drag it around in their file manager. You can't really expect the general public to use the command line (anymore).

> You can't really expect the general public to use the command line (anymore).

Yes, good point. I started reading the linked OSM wiki page, and the more I scrolled, the more I understood why Ben had this service.

However the energy he spent on the service, he could've spent on a single, simple, downloadable app, but what do I know. I don't build anything.

> If everyone used the tool, they'd all hit some OSM tile server with some massive requests (sometimes downloading an entire country) every time they'd update the map.

There are Overpass API servers for that purpose. They lag a few hours behind the main database but they allow larger queries.

Overpass API is not suitable for downloading entire countries.

Use https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm#Country_and_a... for that (right now https://download.geofabrik.de/ is typically the best).

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data in general.

Sad news. Best maps that don’t cost a fortune for my Garmin.

Fortunately http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ is still a thing!

No it isn't.

Contrary to doing the right thing in such a situation as Ben is doing with OpenMapChest, the operator of garmin.openstreetmap.nl went incommunicado years back, but refused to hand over it to anybody else or at least shut it down. Given that it is nearly always broken, not a good state of things.

The last few times I used it, it worked fine for loading maps onto my Garmin Edge 800.

There' also https://www.userbeam.de/ and https://speichenkarte.de/, which make the process easy for the interested user.

Not only garmin.openstreetmap.nl, but also the OSM forum (which thankfully was handed over to OSM Foundation to run on their servers).

What about this isn't "open"? Couldn't anyone just keep compiling these maps? It's all based on OSM and the data is already served via torrent.

It is easily possible, but cumbersome. That’s why there are services to do it easily; I like http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

And several other services: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Downlo...

I've been using the BBBike[0] service for my OSM based Garmin map needs. It exports Garmin img map files optimized for various use cases from OSM data on demand.

[0] https://extract.bbbike.org/

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