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iDrive route download

17K views 53 replies 12 participants last post by  Aussie40d 
#1 ·
while waiting for my car to show up I'm thinking about route management.

It appears that the new iDrive can download and upload via USB.

Anyone out there with a new system that can make a simple multi-point route, download it and send it to me?

The goal would be to understand the format and figure out how to use gmaps, garmin, etc to create a route file for uploading.
 
#2 ·
Route file format

I'd like a copy of that simple route too! Anything will do. I think a simple start, mid-way stop and a destination would suffice, and they could be anywhere.

It would be useful to post it here. To do that manually rename the filetype extension to *.pdf (eg foo.bmw renamed to foo.pdf) and attach it to the forum post with an indication of what the original filetype extension was. (*.bmw was just my guess). We'll know to rename it back to *.bmw or whatever before playing with it, and to create files with suitable extensions. If we crack this route creation nut we'd petition the forum to allow posting of route files.

Of course, of anyone anywhere has information of the file format already I/we would like to know too. It may save a lot of head scratching.

I have dreams of a suite of applications or scripts which could:

** allow the creation of routes while away from the car so that they could be easily transferred into the nav system without all the furious iDrive spinning.

** allow post-vehicle analysis such as when on a fun drive (Europe!) we could poke the iDrive knob at interesting waypoints, recover the resultant route, do some magic, and import it into a nav application, or post it to My Maps on google.

My immediate (well, by June) need/desire though is more simple: I just want to create a route file or files which describe my European Delivery itinerary so that when I collect the car in Munich I can educate the car about my whole trip in a moment and not have to annoy my family by whirling the iDrive knob off its bearings.

Frank.
 
#4 ·
The new bmw-routes site allows for multi-destination route creation, complete with pictures, notes, etc. Then there are instructions for downloading the route.

I spent 30 minutes in a 2009 iDrive today and could not find an option for exporting my simple 3 point trip. Import function was there, albeit a little hidden.

Downloading a Munich-Berchtesgaden-Fussen route right now to see what the file looks like. However, the BMW site has so much promise that it might not be necessary to tinker around too much
 
#5 ·
So far, no luck on getting the BMW-routes site to download anything.

The site seems very immature ... strange that they would publish it when it doesn't work. Issues noted so far:

-- switching to miles doesn't work
-- error messages are in part German part English
-- download to USB button does nothing on Safari or Firefox. Haven't been able to try IE, yet
-- attempts to log in result in a server error
 
#9 ·
Sorry, hung was not really what I meant. It seems like it just doesn't connect to anything. Hopefully they will get in working before April. My pick up is 4/17 for M3 sedan.:bigpimp:

When you said the import from USB was hidden, where did you have to go in iDrive to find it?
 
#10 ·
Let me start by professing my complete love for iDrive after toying with it for 1/2 hour. The nav in my infiniti just sucks, the nav in my old pilot was pretty good, the nav in my wife's '07 Acura is decent but confusing ... this thing is like the best of all of them.

However, the only way I could find import is AFTER I'd made a short trip and then in the list trips screen, select that trip and press the knob right to get to some trip options like delete, etc. For some reason, this also has import. With no trip in the system, I couldn't find it.
 
#11 ·
BMW-Routes reverts to development teaser

From today's bmw-routes pages (which are revised and without the experimental 'build a route' part we were playing with over the weekend):

Individual route planning with BMW Routes.

Innovation. At the Automobilsalon Genf 2009 and parallel at the CeBIT 2009 BMW ConnectedDrive presents an innovative function upgrade for BMW routes: the planning of one's own routes in the internet with subsequent transmission into the car. As of this spring everyone who is interested can with this application here at BMW routes plan one's very own routes. Your creativity aren't set boundaries. Decide on the course of the journey and interesting places to see. Add pictures as well as useful facts to your route or individual point of interests. Transmit your final route into the car and print it as your road book. BMW ConnectedDrive offers as an innovation the transmission and the import of complete routes onto the navigation system: This is possible in all BMW models models with the new generation iDrive system and the extra equipment navigation system Professional via USB stick. BMW ConnectedDrive customers can easily lodge their own routes in the BMW online portal to transmit them comfortably into the car.

It all still sounds very promising, and I like the indication that it will be launching this spring. Technically, my ED date of June 2nd is before summer though so according to my track record it is most likely to be launched just AFTER I collect my car.

I wonder if the weekend teaser version of the website was a deliberate act to forstall any amateur developers from investing time to create a competitor service/application. In which case a hearty thank you to the folks at BMW who saved me the wasted effort. I certainly won't be lifting a finger now I know that this is coming.

Frank
 
#12 ·
Haha,

they should encourage open source development. Some of the most successful projects have been the ones that get the army of creative users building apps they didn't imagine or want to invest in. I wish they had a development pack, etc ... time to port Bejeweled to the nav system :)

But seriously, I'm still going to take it apart and put it back together if I can get hold of a downloaded route. I'm thinking of taking the output of a garmin, etc, or the output of gEarth or gMaps for import.
 
#13 ·
BMW-Routes website is up and LIVE!!!

www.bmw-routes.com is now working.

I was able to create a new route (BMW Welt - Fussen - Friedrichshafen) and download it for a USB Stick. The format is a ZIP of a gzipped tar-ball containing a png image and an XML file very recognizable as something similar or possibly identical to other XML formatted route files I've seen elsewhere. In other words - it is a perfect system. The website for creating routes, or it is easy to adapt routes from other sources to the BMW format.

Attaching my test route. Rename the file from Test.pdf to Test.zip. It is NOT a real pdf. I am just using that extension since it is supported by the forum.

I have yet to experiment with routes outside Germany, but looking good!

Frank.
 

Attachments

#16 · (Edited)
Try out a US Route

You'd better build a US route of your own. The web tool allows you to. The US map equipped nav system in a local car may barf if it tries to digest a route with out-of-map European locations.

Per other threads a bug/feature may require you to create a route on the car before the car activates the capability to import routes.

Frank.
 
#18 ·
Mixed results.

I had two routes on the USB ... the one attached by FrankAZ and one that I created showing waypoints in Colorado.

The system imported the Germany tour, even showed me the stops of Fussen and Friederichshafen, but of course could not map these places.

It did not import the Colorado trip, though.

So, I whipped out my mac and cleared the Germany trip from the memory stick, cleared out the existing trip and re-imported. It showed import progress, but did not load up a trip. I'll take a look at the XML files and see if I can figure out the difference.

Ran out of time at this point.

My previous observation of having to create a trip before finding import is wrong. Once your in the trips list screen, a simple press of the options button (or joystick right) gets you to the correct screen.

However, there didn't seem to be an option to delete a specific trip, only "Delete All Trips". Seems a little awkward.

But, at least we know that the main point of this exercise will work. We can create a trip on that site, save it and take it, and travel around Europe until contented :) My wife will be a lot happier not having me sit in the car for hours programming the Nav.
 
#19 ·
Mixed results.

But, at least we know that the main point of this exercise will work. We can create a trip on that site, save it and take it, and travel around Europe until contented :) My wife will be a lot happier not having me sit in the car for hours programming the Nav.
Cracking stuff! Thanks for the immediate mano-a-auto feedback. At least it works for my routes :) . Puzzling why it hiccoughed on your local route.

I have to go to the dealer again in the next few days to hand over my ED PO and notarized docs. I'll take a few local routes with me to experiment with if I get a chance. I'll include a monster one with all the images and detail to represent the kind of over-the-top creation I'll take to Germany with me in June.
 
#23 ·
Last night I created a crazy meandering route from various addresses in AZ, GA and NJ which I knew street addresses for off the top of my head and downloaded the 5000+ mile route. I didn't look at the xml but it was a non-zero file size. I used IE7 on Vista, FWIW.
 
#26 ·
O.K.

I get routes generated for Germany from:

Chrome 1.0
IE 6.0
Safari 3.2.1

No output on the simple Colorado route from any of them.

As of now, I can't log in, either. So there's no way to save your work.

And, there are no options to make the thing pick the roads you want to drive on ... would be nice to be able to tell it "I want to take road x on the way there". I suppose we can inject more destinations in order to force the issue.
 
#33 ·
I'll do it. Need to head in to the dealer next week for financing probably.

Or, I'll head down there this weekend. They are excited ... I've promised to train them on the use of the Nav system once we've got it all figured out. So far, I've written a white paper for them on the "smartphone integration" and now educated them about BMW-Routes, which they apparently haven't been told about.

Maybe I should be asking for commissions :)

Now, I've been doing some toying when I can. I've got routes created by viaMichelin and downloaded for Garmin and TomTom. Then created the same 3 waypoints using Routes.

The TomTom file is binary ... not messing with that for now.

The Garmin file is straight XML ... there's now some potential for creating a conversion for any utility that can create Garmin output files for use in the car :yikes:

However, the Routes file is very detailed. The Garmin file is basically the Lat/Long of the waypoints, clearly then relying on the machine it's imported into to map the actual route directions. The Routes file includes a ton of waypoints describing the route, not just the destinations. The real question will be "if I revise the xml tags of the Garmin output file, will the car take it?" If it does, I can whip together a python or perl converter pretty quickly.

Any preferences? Guess I could also fiddle with the utilities to make the python a stand-alone exe ... or put it onto a website ... maybe that makes the most sense so that I (we) can control and modify the source code.

I wonder how long before ViaMichelin provides a BMW output format directly???
 
#34 ·
However, the Routes file is very detailed. The Garmin file is basically the Lat/Long of the waypoints, clearly then relying on the machine it's imported into to map the actual route directions. The Routes file includes a ton of waypoints describing the route, not just the destinations.
It was easy to ceate a schema from the original XML file. It would have been much easier if I could find where the original schema is stored on the BMW site. The XML file has jaxb in it, so the application is written in JAVA with an XML interface.

The start and destination have <Importance>always</Importance>. I would guess that the more detailed information in the start and destination are in the same format that you would use to manually search for a location.

The waypoints have <Importance>optional</Importance>. The waypoints are sequentially numbered <Id>6</Id> and just have the Latitude and Longitude.

I would not be surprised if you could just use the start and end destinations and skip the waypoints.
 
#36 ·
None of us can. Perhaps someone that's gotten an ED vehicle with the European system???

Current guess from reading the very confusing "requirements" section is that you have to have a "Connected Drive" account, which appears to be a European client feature, possibly in US in the future.
 
#37 ·
I am planning to work on a parser that will take a Google Maps "link" and parse it into route form.

Should have it knocked out by this weekend.

This way, we can "save" our work since the link contains all of your waypoints. This will not be as complete as the BMW system with pretty icons, etc, unless I figure out something after the basic system is working.

Chris
 
#38 ·
O.K.

Status on this project -- stalled :confused:

  • Built several mockup files for testing -- they did not work
  • Initial work for simply "input your link" website -- done
  • Parse input link and show all waypoints via website -- done
  • Provide mock-up code via web (copy/paste to file) -- done
  • Learn how to create and download the resulting file to users machine -- open

Three issues now
  1. Mockups were tested by a Fester and they did not import
  2. Attempt to parse route of die Alpenstraße resulted in a waypoint of "unknown road"
  3. My trip starts Monday

So, back to the drawing board, so to speak. This is tough since I don't have a car to experiment with.

The "unknown road" bug came as a total surprise and means I'll have to learn how to reverse geocode the hex-coded string that Google must be using. There is a ton of info on Google's site on this. Maybe I'll get tired of driving my car in the Alps and work on this during the trip ;)

If the reverse-geocode via php isn't proving a quick path, I'll probably switch to massaging the Garmin output from viaMichelin created routes and see if I can make that work.

In the meantime, if anyone has spare time and wants to find code that will let you take the gmaps geocode string and turn it into a PHP array ...
 
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