marchello2000

OK. After I saw the post from Chuck I simply could not resist. Screw being tired, forget that I have a meeting ungodly early tomorrow - when you have an opportunity to give back to the MP3Car community you take it no matter what the cost, well, almost

Anyway, I wrote this quick and dirty tool that should do the trick. You will need .NET Framework 2.0, but 1.1 may do. You can use this URL to convert a ZIP code to lat/long which you will need for the utility: http://www.zipinfo.com/search/zipcode.htm.

Enter the lat/long, select zoom, hit preview, pan around, and when you are satisfied hit the download button. Select your Streetdeck\Virtual Earth folder (don't select the Hybrid folder inside), and voila!

The tool will download +-8 images of the hybrid map in each direction with the image you have in the preview in the center, very rough I know, but hey I whipped it up in the past 2 hours.

BIG DISCLAIMER: I don't actually have SD running right now so I could not verify that this thing works, so please don't judge too harshly. I will be fixing my CarPC and SD this weekend so I will give it a try and polish. But in the mean time try it and tell me what you think.

Download it from: http://www.vulfson.com/SDMapCache.exe

Mark

p.s. Thanks for the pointer Chuck!!!

MP3Car.com

 

bembowe

marchello2000
thanks for taking the initiative to come up with something. i'll give it a try once my internet starts working in my car pc. Any chance you actually work for microsoft . speculating based on your location.

i'll give you any feedback once i get this up and running.

marchello2000

I did not make it clear, but... You actually can run this from any PC, and then copy the folder(s) that the app makes to your Streetdeck\Virtual Earth\Hybrid folder.

It's not the easiest way but it works if you don't have internet in your CarPC. I am also working on a neat syncing solution that does not require any network connectivity, hopefully this weekend I will get to work on it and then I can post more details.

Thanks for the kind words!

Mark
p.s. Yes, I do work for Microsoft, in fact I work for the Automotive team (if you've heard of the Ford SYNC project - that's my team, check it out on http://www.syncmyride.com - coming to a Ford vehicle near you very soon!)

bembowe

thats a cool work project. didnt think of microsoft venturing out in this realm. any chance of u incorporating this with your car pc?

anyways back to topic. I'll check it out this weekend.

P3D4T0R

I just finished playing with this, did everything between 5 and 16 for the three places I go the most then copied it over to my CarPC... Congrats man it works Thank you very much. Is there any way I could get the source I have few ideas to improve the app id like to try out. Thanks again.

__________________
"Mess with the best, die like the rest."
Work Log --> Old Car (Totaled)
Work Log v2 --> New Car (Totaled)
Work Log v3 --> GMC Suburban K2500 (Work in progress)

bembowe

men, i just tried it out in my pc. the download works great. i have yet to try with SD. So far looks very good and promising. i already have lots of ideas about automating this. if you are willing to share the code, I would love to work with you to make a digimod out of this.

thepunkerguy

You guys are awesome, I have yet to try it, but will tonight. As long as it works I am happy, but making it automated, like maybe where you could enter the 4 corner coordinates of an area and it would automatically cache that whole square. Also, making it cache the images at all zoom levels automatically would be great too. So far so good!
- Mike

thepunkerguy

So.. lets say i put in my long/lat that i get from that website, that gets me right in my zip code, but once i cache that location i want to pan over left about 16 clicks and cache that, but when i pan over about 16 clicks, then choose "download", it starts downloading, but it moves it back to the original long/lat i put in and downloads that again rather than the new location i panned over too. Is that a bug, or am i doing something wrong?
- Mike

MP3Car.com

 

thepunkerguy

Or I was thinking, even better, could you easily add another box where we enter in a number of how many +- tiles we want it to download in all directions of the current preview.. that way instead of 8 we can put in our own number, or multiple boxes where we can put how many tiles +- are downloaded in each direction?

marchello2000

Thanks for the feedback. I updated the tool. Try it now. There is some trigonometry that I am not too sure about (I was never a huge fan and it being 1AM is not making it better ) but I hope it works alright...

As far as making this a DigitalMod that would be awesome, can we write DigitalMods in .NET?

Mark

p.s. Still no running SD here, this is starting to frustrate me...

thepunkerguy

So what exactly does the new "cells" box mean.. is that like the +-8 thing where we can enter our own number? BTW I am sorta drink right now, so I hope i make sense
- Mike

P3D4T0R

How about throwing in the ability to download all of the zoom levels or to chose which ones we want to get? And how about putting up the source code as well?

__________________
"Mess with the best, die like the rest."
Work Log --> Old Car (Totaled)
Work Log v2 --> New Car (Totaled)
Work Log v3 --> GMC Suburban K2500 (Work in progress)

thepunkerguy

Even for a drunk guy you sound quite pushy! j/k sounds like a good idea.. and i swear to drunk i'm not God!

P3D4T0R

No osssifer your drink

__________________
"Mess with the best, die like the rest."
Work Log --> Old Car (Totaled)
Work Log v2 --> New Car (Totaled)
Work Log v3 --> GMC Suburban K2500 (Work in progress)

P3D4T0R

Really though I'm not trying to be pushy I I just think the question got overlooked because he implemented your idea but didn't even egnolige my question or that I even had an idea... I don't know, really, I haven't slept in a while maybe I'm just being retarded...

__________________
"Mess with the best, die like the rest."
Work Log --> Old Car (Totaled)
Work Log v2 --> New Car (Totaled)
Work Log v3 --> GMC Suburban K2500 (Work in progress)

MP3Car.com