video / picture of M5Maps?

[ari-s]

I don't have an M5paper, but having maps on it seems extremely intriguing!
Could you add a video or may some pictures of it?

[codingjoe]

Hi @ari-s,

Thanks for reaching out. I am excited that someone found this :)

I don't have a video, but a picture:

In general, it's certainly a nice little project. I wouldn't rely on it on a tour yet. Mainly because 7 inch (ca. 18 cm) is tiny for a map. Sure, you can zoom, but every time you do so it drains your battery. Also, since you don't have GPS, you will need to be able to find your location on a map via landmarks and a compass. That kind of thing is certainly easier on a regular map.

For the moment, I'd say a regular map is cheaper and more versatile. But, if there ever is a good 9 inch e-Ink table, maybe even bi-color, that would be wonderful. I would actually love to add a second app that would allow you to read plain text e-books as well.

That way you'd have one device for books and maps, which would be a wonderful companion for hiking.

I hope my answer helped. If you'd like, I could shoot a video later today.

Cheers!
Joe

[ari-s]

Hi @codingjoe!

looks nice! Plus it's encouraging to see that you can do this with a pretty small amount of code! I'd love to see a video, but don't spend too much effort :)

TBH (And here it get's pretty much off-topic for M5maps) I'm mostly intrigued by the M5paper since it seems like it could be the closest thing to the phone that I want.

For me a mobile phone has to:

0. fit comfortably in my pocket (hate to say that I even have to write this)
1. make calls
2. play music
3. navigation

and of course the M5paper actually can't do any of there, but it seems kind-of feasible to reach (add an LTE, GPS and audiocodec module) an of course the appropriate software.

from the software side, navigation seemed the biggest piece. But if I reduce that from full navigation to display map+position+gpx track, it actually doesn't seem too bad. That's why I'm kind-of hyped since I saw your project :D

But maybe an easier approach would be to get the M5paper, take the screen and combine it with one of these LTE smart module. It's basically the Chips of a phone as a module, without the rest. This way I'd get the whole software stack and just need to hope it'd be somewhat usable with the epaper.

But since you're saying every redraw consumes energy: is that a bit amount? do you only have a few redras before the battery gets empy?

great reply! sorry I didn't even see it until now.

Cheers! Ari

[codingjoe]

Hi Ari,

uff, build a phone is hard. Especially, network state management is a night make. I actually have been working on a new OS for mobile devices many moons ago.

If you are looking for a simple phone, Nokia still builds modern successors to the famous 3310. Or Flip phones, if that's more your style.

Meanwhile, I am looking into new hardware, that has a larger screen and could double as both an e-reader and map. It's sad, that most commercial tables are closed source. No wonder they never took off.

Cheers!
Joe

[worldtest2k]

Hi @codingjoe ,

I hope you are well ans enjyoing your coding!
The picture of the map on the M5 paper looks amazing.
It looks like you used Arduino IDE to code it - is that correct?
I'm trying to get micropython running on the M5 Paper but am having issues.
What issues did you have coding for it?

Thanks in advance.

[codingjoe]

Hi @worldtest2k,

Thanks for reaching out. Yes, I did you the Arduino IDE and C++ to write the app. However, I don't really recommend it. The Arduino IDE is… bad. But setup on VSCode is even harder. Since I had no prior experience with that particular hardware, I opted for Arduino. It was also nice to use their library… until I had to write my own BitMap renderer, since theirs didn't support 4 bit encodings.

Anyhow, I never used MicroPython, even though I'd consider myself a rather experienced Python developer.

I wish you the best of luck. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.

Best
Joe