Setting up OSMand for Cycling

[Psyclist]

One often mentioned and very sensible choice for replacing Hammerhead's pitiful attempt at navigation software is sideloaded OSMand. However, this app has hundreds of options and can be a bit overwhelming to set up properly if you haven't used it before so I put together a little guide how to get the most out of it for cycling and within the specific constraints of the Karoo. I assume you've got it installed already using one of the excellent guides others have made already. BTW I highly recommend installing it via F-Droid -- it's a little more clicking and waiting if you should have to reset your Karoo but you'll always get the latest updates that way, and OSMand is very actively being developed.

That said, on to the configuration! Start the app, pop out the menu using the hamburger menu in the lower left corner and select ...

Plugins: only the following make sense; some others may be enabled by default but you can disable them.

• Online maps: if you have a SIM card (or a special database file, see below), this can greatly improve your map display
• Parking Position: left your bike somewhere and took the Karoo with you? Quickly navigate back to it.
• Trip recording: not strictly necessary as that should be the Karoo software's job, but it enables stuff like online tracking if you want.
• Contour lines: use terrain maps. Very useful in mountainous regions, plus the terrain can be used for making navigation decisions as well.
• OSM editing: get involved with OpenStreetMap by adding map notes and points of interest right from your dashboard. If you add a note, chances are the mistake will be fixed already by the time of your next map update - and everybody profits, including other cyclists in your area!

Settings:

• General settings:
  • Default profile: obviously you want "cycling" here
  • Map/Screen orientation: doesn't matter as the Karoo only works in portrait mode anyway
  • Localization: all up to your personal taste and upbringing
  • Misc
    • Use Kalman filter: yes. Some phones smooth the data from the compass by themselves already but the Karoo doesn't, so if you don't check this, the map will flail around wildly when you set it to rotate with compass or movement direction.
    • No animations: the battery savings are unmeasurable on the Karoo with its powerful GPU for the small display, so leave it off.
    • Fullscreen mode: lets you make everything overlaid on the map disappear with a click. Very useful, especially with limited screen real estate.
    • Don't show startup messages: yes please, don't get on my nerves!
• Navigation settings: select this and then the cycling icon from the selection box
  • Navigation service: you can leave this at "OSMand", or change it to "BROUTER" if you have this app installed. BRouter offers very advanced bicycle routing that allows you to write your own routing rules for diferent kinds of bikes and riding styles, but it's still a bit cumbersome to use as it requires its own map files, so I don't bother on the Karoo.
  • Routing Preferences
    • Avoid: "unpaved roads" and "stairs" would make sense for road bikers Note that this only works if someone has actually mapped the road surface in OpenStreetMap so depending on the country it's not quite a guarantee that you won't encounter any of these on your routed ride. If that happens: click on the road ahead and select "Avoid road". A little road-construction sign will appear and you will be rerouted. Then add a map note for someone to update the map and the problem will eventually go away (if it doesn't, you'll have familiarize yourself with the editor on https://osm.org/, which is a good idea anyway)
    • Select elevation fluctuation: depends on your preferred riding style: avoid that climb even if the route is a little longer, or go right across?
    • Allow motorways: well...probably not
    • Use elevation data: yes! You'll have to download the contour lines map (just once as mountains don't tend to move around much) and get better routing in return.
  • Navigation preferences
    • Auto-center map view: you'll want to set this not too high, maybe 15s.
    • Auto zoom map: mid-range works fine but it's up to you whether you want to see more detail or a better overview. Depends a bit on your map style as well as the style determines the details visible at a certain zoom.
    • Snap to Road: I leave it off as it can lead to strange effects when roads are close together and the GPS isn't 100% precise (although the Karoo's is pretty damn good)
    • Show alerts: "lanes" is the only one that kinda makes sense here
    • Announce: "street names" ("Turn slightly right on Bay Street") is helpful, "Track waypoints", too.
    • Repeat navigation instructions: I've got this on at 7min as it's reassuring to hear you're still on track once in a while, especially if the next turn is many kilometers away and there are some obtuse-angled turnoffs in between where you're not quite sure which one is considered "straight on" or sometimes only one is mapped anyway and you're not sure which)
    • Arrival announcement: in my experience, turnoffs are usually announced well ahead even for driving and way too early for cycling, so I have this set to "Late"
    • Map orientation threshold: off or 0 km/h. Map orientation to movement direction is fine for me; it's also easy to change with a single click on the map screen's compass icon if you have it on.
    • Turn screen on: 15s or something, maybe longer. Very nice feature for those daytime rides where otherwise the screen backlight would be the major drain on your battery. Using this you can keep your screen off to save battery and it will automatically turn on whenever the router has an announcement to make. Just crank your brightness up all the way and it's even eye-catching enough to kinda make up for the lack of audible cues.
  • Voice
    • Voice guidance: whatever language you prefer, TTS (Text to Speech) is the better option
    • Voice guidance output: "Media/music audio"
• Plugins (these are plugin-specific settings for everything you enabled before)
  • Online maps: check "use the internet" if you have a SIM card
  • Trip recording: just read through the options here. Most are up to personal taste; a notable one that can replace paid services like Strava's Beacon for people who have a web server already is "online tracking".
  • OSM editing: always check "offline editing", otherwise OSMand will make you wait for the upload to finish whenever you map something or add a map note.

Configure screen: here you can select which elements should be overlaid on the map, which is rather important on a screen this small. These configurations are mode-specific, so you can use different elements for hiking or cycling, say.

• Quick action: pressing this takes you to an empty screen with a blue Plus sign. Here you can add actions that you need often but that are usually hidden in a menu somewhere, and put them on a "quick action popout" that you can access with a single click on the map. I have only "Set underlay to Microsoft Earth" and "Set to no underlay" here.
• Right panel: you can show a whole lot of items here but for a good overview, better keep the list small. I have "Destination" on (i.e. distance to destination), "Time to go" (select the dots to change between Time to go and Arrival time), Speed and Altitude. For planning routes, the Radius ruler can be practical, too.
• Left panel: only navigation stuff goes here. I switch it all on except for "Next turn (small)". "Next turn" is really useful and the compass icon can be used to switch map orientations, so take at least these two.
• Remaining elements:
  • Transparent widgets: very useful so you can see the map underneath
  • Display position always in center: matter of taste, try it, I don't use it
  • Street name: takes up a whole lot of space on top, may be useful for urban navigation though
  • Map markers: change this to "Widgets", otherwise you'll get a huge bar telling you where your markers are, taking up lots of room on top.

Now if you selected "cycling " as default profile, there will be a little cyclist icon in the upper left corner. Pressing it allows you to change the profile as well as changing many aspects of the map design. All of these visual changes are particular to the mode you're currently in just like the screen configuration, so you could have e.g. different map styles for bike and car navigation. The same menu can be accessed through the Menu button, then selecting "Configure map".

Configure map:

• Show:
  • Favorites: as long as you don't have too many of these you'll probably want it on. Favorite spots will be marked with colored stars on the map (you can even create your own categories with custom colors)
  • POI overlay/labels: this gets turned on if you search for a kind of point of interest such as "ATM" and select "show ... on the map" to see all of them in your vicinity. Normally they take up to much space on the screen though so you can come here to turn them off again.
  • Transport: public transport routes; OK for routing on foot, off for cycling
  • GPX files: turn this on to get a GPX route overlaid.
  • Map markers: on, set little flags for any point you consider important without necessarily routing to it.
  • Map source: this should usually be at the default of "Offline vector maps". If you're in an area with good cell coverage you can try online maps, too. They cost bandwidth but are usually better rendered, such as CycleMap. Note that the vector maps are used for routing though, so online tile maps may not be perfectly in sync with what your router believes. With vector maps being updated monthly, chances are that the router's idea is more up to date though.
  • Mapillary is a plugin for access to something like amateur-level StreetView imagery. Usable (rarely) for mapping or route planning on bigger screens, utterly useless on the Karoo.
  • Overlay/Underlay map: endless possibilities for beautifying or screwing up your map display! The most useful for me has been to select "Install more" for an Underlay Map (make sure you're online!), install "Microsoft Earth" and use that. It gives you satellite tiles under your regular map. See below on how to get that without an internet connection.
  • Contour lines (if you have the plugin activated): yes, please! You can make them disappear when the map is zoomed out so rendering would be both slow and distracting. Zoom 13 works well.
  • Hillshade layer: if you have the hillshade maps downloaded, it's a good complement for the contour lines, they usually show the terrain better when the map is zoomed out.
  • OSM notes: only if you have a SIM, but I find those red blobs very distracting anyway.
• Map rendering
  • Map style: up to you, play with it! The default works well but depending on your riding you may prefer Offroad, Touring, or Topo. If you install OpenFietsMap (see below), it will turn up here.
  • Map mode: if/how to switch between day and night mode. Up to you, but I prefer day mode with display brightness turned way down even at night.
  • Map magnifier: the higher this is, the fatter map features become. For a relatively low-res (compared to phones) display like the Karoo's I find 75% to work well. 50% and lower seems to break rendering and stuff disappears.
  • Text size: depends on your eyes; 75% is still OK for browsing at rest but 100% is much more readable while riding.
  • Details: what options you have avaialable here depends on your chosen map style, but "Show road surface" is usually a good idea when available. It color codes concrete roads with dashed lines in blue, asphalt in black, gravel in gray and unpaved in brown. "Show road quality" complements that by filling in the gaps in the dashes with another color indicating how smooth the surface is, so you might have black-pink for an asphalt road full of potholes, brown-blue for an unpaved but well-compacted and smooth road or brown-red for "unpaved and really bad". It sometimes makes sense where I live but may be visual overkill in many areas.
  • Hide: I check "Boundaries" (who wants to see state and municipal boundaries when cycling?), "Proposed objects" (TBH I don't even know where to find any) and "Underground objects" (my bike stays above the ground, thank you very much). Hiding polygons may be necessary when using an underlay map but you can switch that on from the Underlay screen, too.
  • Routes: cycle and MTB routes, obviously!

Finally, here are two advanced things to play around with:

• If you're into scouting out new routes in unmapped territory, having satellite imagery available offline can be invaluable. You can use OSMand Map Creator (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAndMapCreator) to get them onto your Karoo
  • Follow the above Wiki page to install the program and start it.
  • Select "Create a new tile source" from the "Source of tiles" menu.
  • Add a URL like this: https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/digitalgl ... 94fHV289Pg Note that this URL won't work forever as they change their access tokens once in a while. The JOSM editor usually comes with up to date URLs but you can also just ask here if it doesn't work.
  • Select that tile source from the menu and the satellite images should be loaded on screen
  • Select your desired area by drawing a box, then click "Preload area" on the upper right. You'll probably want to download everything starting around zoom 8 until the maximum. The program will give you a number of tiles and an estimated size, make sure this is not too much for the Karoo and that you have at least twice that much free on your disk.
  • Click "Download tiles" and wait. Don't hold your breath, usually this takes several hours.
  • From the "source of tiles" menu select "Create sqlite database". This will create a single big file in the tile directory (on Linux this is "~/osmand/tiles", on Windows I'm not sure, just search your personal folder for something called "tiles")
  • Use adb to push the file to "/sdcard/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/tiles/" under a name that ends in ".sqlitedb".
  • In OSMand, select the database as a tile source in the Map Underlay menu.
• While map-style-wise I prefer the Touring style as I do a lot of MTB, it may be worth checking out the "OpenFietsMap" style developed by a Dutch cyclists' association, especially for urban cycling. It's not included with OSMand but available on Github, and here's how to use it:
  • Download the style file at
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ligfi ... render.xml
  • Install it:

    Code: Select all

    adb push OpenFietsMap.render.xml /sdcard/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/rendering

  • You may have to kill OSMand from the list of apps to make the style show up in
    the menu!

Enjoy proper navigation on your bike!

Edit: here's how it looks with satellite imagery in the background and color coded by road surface:

[Steve]

Awesome. Thanks for spending the time to create and post such a comprehensive guide.

[gadaga]

Thanks from me as well! Perfect

However.... Could anyone please also explain how to us the application to do a off and/or online planning of a multi point route please? All I seem to be able doing is to define a point and navigate toward it. But I do not know how to plan a real complete route...

Thanks,

Paul

[Psyclist]

That's a good idea, Paul!
I just installed a screenshot app so I'l give it a try (never mind the non-sequential timestamps, I just noticed some of the screenshots I took yesterday were crap so I redid them today ):

So I'll start with our regular rider's meeting point at Joma café that I have saved as a favorite. Just click on it


and select either of the items in the menu as they refer to the same thing anyway (sometimes you'll get different ones if POIs are close together)


Once you've selected something, press Directions


The default that OSMand will assume is that the selected point is the destination and you're going from the current position. You can swap start and destinations using the arrows on the right or select new ones by just clicking on them and selecting from the popups. For this example I changed it into a round trip so start and destination are the same - just click From: and select the same spot again.


To make it a round trip, we need at least one waypoint, so leave the menu with the Back button and look around on the map until you find where you want to go. Long-tap to mark, and you'll get the line-of-sight distance from the starting point already.


When you press Directions now that you have a route already, you get a menu asking what to do. Add as last intermediate destination is the one you need ("First intermediate" would work just as well now but usually it won't later when you build the route with more waypoints)


This is the result: going and coming back the same way. Efficient, but not what you usually want for a joyride.


So I select a different spot that I want to pass by on the way back. Long-tap, click Directions, add as last intermediate:


Here's the result. Still kinda ... suboptimal (the router is more commute-oriented, you could probably get closer by using BRouter with an offroad profile). I know there's lots of nice trail north of that yellow concrete road loop you see north of the waypoint, so let's force it to go through there.


Setting another waypoint as last intermediate yields this route, which is obviously worse as the last waypoint should have gone between the first and the second one. There's no good way for the router to guess this, so we have to help it and reorder the waypoints.


Click the Directions arrow at the bottom of the map, then the button with the little flag.


You get this menu where you can just grab waypoints on the left and slide them to the right position in the list.


Moved the third one up to second position, route recalculated, looking much better!


Still, going out on that nasty highway is fine for getting there quickly, but to avoid as much of it as possible on the way back, I'll set another waypoint. Same procedure: add it, then pull up the waypoint menu and reorder.


Now that the route looks OK, let's get some stats by clicking the Directions arrow. A little over 80 km, a time calculation you can ignore (always based on 20 km/h average), and an easily overlooked little right arrow on the panel that tells you this. Click it.


This only works if you have the Contour Lines plugin and a corresponding download of height profiles for your riding area. The graph looks a bit confusing because OSMand insists on plotting the gradient on top of the height profile. On a bigger screen you'll find a button to select only one of the two, but it's missing on the Karoo, so just ignore the green line. One of these days I'll file a bug asking them to get rid of them because it's worse than useless, after all we can estimate steepness very easily from a height profile. Anyway, the height profile is also horizontally zoomable for more precision and by clicking "analyze on map" (hidden below the lower border of the screen in this screenshot) you can slide a dot over your route and see where what part of the profile is. This is quite a bit too small to be fun on the Karoo though.
You can share your route as a GPX file if you have sideloaded some app that will consume it, save it as such to use later (sadly there's no way yet to just save the waypoints so it could be dynamically recalculated when you get a map update with new ways), or crash OSMand by clicking "print" (it works on a phone but apparently the Karoo is missing some critical component so OSMand just hangs waiting for the Godot service)

[gadaga]

Thanks so much for this tutorial. You're very good at writing these!!

That makes it a lot clearer.

When I'm doing as you say, after entering a new waypoint, the new route on the little karoo screen is dezoomed automatically each time. This is rather annoying as I have to rezoom to define the location of another waypoint.

Is there a setting which deactivates this dezoom please?

Thanks a lot

[Psyclist]

Thanks, my pleasure
I know, that zooming out thing is pretty annoying in this situation, especially when you know you'll need to add multiple waypoints in a small region, alas I don't think it can be disabled.
I just made my first build of OSMand from the official sources; maybe I'll get as far as putting together a custom version that disables this. Will see...

[gadaga]

I didn't know that the sources are 'open'... I would be very interested in trying to modify some minor things as well... But that would require a lot of willpower and.... time...

Keep us posted please if ever you manage to take out this automatic zoom behaviour!

Thanks,

Paul

Thanks, my pleasure
I know, that zooming out thing is pretty annoying in this situation, especially when you know you'll need to add multiple waypoints in a small region, alas I don't think it can be disabled.
I just made my first build of OSMand from the official sources; maybe I'll get as far as putting together a custom version that disables this. Will see...

[blokeinlondon]

Great guide to seeing up Osmand+.. it's a great navigation app, love it. Your guide just makes it that much easier to start using it as it can be overwhelming.

Question.. Can you change the transparency of the planned route? Sometimes it's just that bit too strong to see through to the road names when trying to review your route!

Thanks

[Psyclist]

Great guide to seeing up Osmand+.. it's a great navigation app, love it. Your guide just makes it that much easier to start using it as it can be overwhelming.

Thanks

Question.. Can you change the transparency of the planned route? Sometimes it's just that bit too strong to see through to the road names when trying to review your route!

No, I don't think that's possible. New features keep popping up all the time (my screenshots above are already a bit out of date with regard to the routing screens, especially the height profile) but I haven't found a way to do that. Might be worth filing an enhancement bug here:https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues

[rikponne]

If you're into scouting out new routes in unmapped territory, having satellite imagery available offline can be invaluable. You can use OSMand Map Creator (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAndMapCreator) to get them onto your Karoo

I have tried this, but the URL no longer works. Could you share a new one, or explain how I can get one myself?

I tried downloading the Microsoft Earth tiles. That seemed to be working for a relatively small area (Vientiane downtown), but for a larger area it seemed to take very long ot not at all (no progress after an hour or so). How long did it take you to download the larger Vientiane area before?

Thanks,
Rik

[Steve]

If you're into scouting out new routes in unmapped territory, having satellite imagery available offline can be invaluable. You can use OSMand Map Creator (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAndMapCreator) to get them onto your Karoo

I have tried this, but the URL no longer works. Could you share a new one, or explain how I can get one myself?

The URL is atill working ok for me. Give it another try.

[rikponne]

If you're into scouting out new routes in unmapped territory, having satellite imagery available offline can be invaluable. You can use OSMand Map Creator (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAndMapCreator) to get them onto your Karoo

I have tried this, but the URL no longer works. Could you share a new one, or explain how I can get one myself?

The URL is atill working ok for me. Give it another try.

Maybe I am doing it wrong then. I am simply copying and pasting the URL into the "URL template with placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z}" box. When I click OK I get a message: "Please specify all placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z} in URL".

[rikponne]

I have tried this, but the URL no longer works. Could you share a new one, or explain how I can get one myself?

The URL is atill working ok for me. Give it another try.

Maybe I am doing it wrong then. I am simply copying and pasting the URL into the "URL template with placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z}" box. When I click OK I get a message: "Please specify all placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z} in URL".

Okay, I worked out that I needed to replace the "/%7B$z%7D/%7B$x%7D/%7B$y%7D" with "/{$z}/{$x}/{$y}" in the URL to make it work. Downloading now!

[Steve]

Okay, I worked out that I needed to replace the "/%7B$z%7D/%7B$x%7D/%7B$y%7D" with "/{$z}/{$x}/{$y}" in the URL to make it work. Downloading now!

Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you meant that the URL in the earlier post wasn't working.

[rikponne]

Okay, I worked out that I needed to replace the "/%7B$z%7D/%7B$x%7D/%7B$y%7D" with "/{$z}/{$x}/{$y}" in the URL to make it work. Downloading now!

Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you meant that the URL in the earlier post wasn't working.

My fault. My original post wasn't clear.

[rikponne]

The URL is atill working ok for me. Give it another try.

Maybe I am doing it wrong then. I am simply copying and pasting the URL into the "URL template with placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z}" box. When I click OK I get a message: "Please specify all placeholders {$x}, {$y}, {$z} in URL".

Okay, I worked out that I needed to replace the "/%7B$z%7D/%7B$x%7D/%7B$y%7D" with "/{$z}/{$x}/{$y}" in the URL to make it work. Downloading now!

So the download got stuck at 1.1%. Left it for hours and cancelled it. Looked in the target folder, and there were 4Gb worth of tiles (the expected size), so it seemed the download had been successful after all. I decided to try to build the sqlite database, which also seemed to work, and then pushed the database onto the Karoo successfully. I killed the Osmand app, restarted it, and tried to add the database as a mapsource, but did not see it in the list. Also tried to find it in the Underlay map list, but without success. Am I doing something wrong, or was the download perhaps incomplete and the database therefore unusable?

[Psyclist]

Hi Rik, good to see you! So you ended up getting a Karoo?
About that map file, did you make sure to rename it to something-dot-sqlitedb?

[rikponne]

Hi Rik, good to see you! So you ended up getting a Karoo?
About that map file, did you make sure to rename it to something-dot-sqlitedb?

Yes, I got a Karoo! And having fun with it.
The filename of the database that was created is "Region.Test.sqlitedb", and this is what I pushed onto the Karoo.

[rikponne]

Hi Rik, good to see you! So you ended up getting a Karoo?
About that map file, did you make sure to rename it to something-dot-sqlitedb?

Yes, I got a Karoo! And having fun with it.
The filename of the database that was created is "Region.Test.sqlitedb", and this is what I pushed onto the Karoo.

Okay, I have figured it out. I forgot I had changed the folder where Osmand stores all its files to “Shared memory”, which put all files in an “osmand” directory on the root of the internal storage. I did that to be able to use Dropsync to drop tracks into Dropbox on my computer and they will automatically show up in Osmand. I moved the Region.Test.sqlitedb file from "/sdcard/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/tiles/" to "sdcard/osmand/tiles/" and now it works.

If anyone is interested in using Dropsync with Osmand, read this: https://jeroenmols.com/blog/2016/07/21/cyclinggps/

[gregm]

Is there any way to execute a payment method to load more than the limited number of free off-line map selections into OSMand?

When I try tapping a purchase button, nothing happens. Is Google Play required?

Thanks!

-Greg