Mittwoch, 29. Januar 2014

First frustration
I could barely believe it when I switched on my RNS 315 navigation device in my new Volkswagen Touran for the first time. But unfortunately it was true. This (approx.) 800 € navigation device misses features that my 8 year old TomTom is capable of! The most frustrating thing for me was that it is not possible to simply move the map by finger, point to an arbitrary position and let the device calculate the route to that point. I consider this as a very basic feature.

Ray of hope 
After searching the internet and playing with device for a while, I found a nice feature that at least lowered the frustration. The RNS 315 has the capability to read vCard Files (.vcf extension) with geo tags inside from an SD card and calculate a route to these targets.

Second frustration
On the Volkswagen website there is a tool that can generate such vCard files. BUT! According to the Volkswagen hotline the vCard feature is officially released only for RNS 510 (the big brother of RNS 315). As a consequence the files generated here do not work on RNS 315. Really great!

Nice solution
After having a closer look to the generated vCard files and after searching some more forums for advice, it turned out that the reason for not accepting the generated files was, that RNS 315 does not accept longitudes or latitudes with more then 6 decimal places.

So finally I decided to create a litte website that helps all neglected RNS 315 users to utilize this really convenient feature. And here it is:

www.spiels-mir.de/navi

Just click somewhere on the Google map. Press "Create vCard" and save the file to a directory named "destinations" (all lowercase!) on your SD card. That's it. Now the "SD card" softkey should become active when you insert the SD card in your navigation device and you can choose the previously saved targets.

Now I wish you more fun with your RNS 315 compared to what you had until now. :-)


Additional information
For all who want to know more details here they are:
  • The SD card must be formatted either FAT or FAT32 
  • The directory on the SD card must be called "destinations" (all lowercase) and must lie in the root folder of the card.
  • Longitude and latitude must not exceed 6 decimal places
  • The .vcf file must be ANSI encoded (not UTF-8)
  • At the end of each line there must be a <CR><LF> (<LF> only, like on UNIX systems is not enough)
  • The device can read a maximum of 200 files from the "destinations" directory (I didn't check this myself!)

HINT 1: When testing I first always got the error message "Error: SD-Card". This message is missleading. I thought that the SD card might not be compatible or the filesystem might not be readable. But you get this message also when everything is fine with the card, but there is simply no file there to read.

HINT 2: When I found out that the card was ok, I afterwards got the message that there are no vCard files on the card. But this was not true. They were there. The device spits out this message also when it finds the files but cannot read the content correctly. In my case it was the <LF> instead of <CR><LF> that caused the problem.

15 Kommentare:

  1. Many thanks for this. I will give it a try

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  2. Hi,

    thnx for the sharing this thing.
    I have proved it , but i came always the error " error SD-Card".
    I can not change the coding of destinations to ANSI, can you please tell me how to change the coding to ANSI

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    1. "destinations" is a directory not a file. So you don't need to change anything. The created vcf file should automatically be created in ANSI by the website, so you should not need to change here anything as well. You can check the file encoding by loading the vcf file for example into an editor like Notepad++ which shows the encoding of the file and lets you change it as well. Just save the file to the "destinations" directory on the SD card. If the hints mentioned in my blog do not help, then I would suggest to try another SD card.

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    2. Thanks so much. I have been fiddeling with all sorts of vcard converters. But none of them worked really well. Your solution is just perfect. At least, now I can feed my Seat Leon navi with some useful data ;-)

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    3. Hi Andreas, I'm very happy to hear that my website is useful for you! When I created this site, to be honest I first didn't fully trust it and always took another navigation device with me. :-) Especially because I'm a wedding DJ and couldn't risk to not find a certain location! :-) But meanwhile I'm completely relying on this tool and using it every weekend! I'm really still impressed how well it works. I just fear that Google might shut down the API that I need for this site for any reason. So the problem is I'm dependen't on Google. But I gues we all are anyway, aren't we? :-)

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  3. Hello,
    How to tell my RNS 315 find folder 'destinations' on SD card? I created that folder on the root of the SD card, On the SD card there are other folders with MP3 files - is this problem?

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    1. Hi,
      no this is not a problem because RNS 315 automatically looks for this special folder.

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    2. So you don't need to tell the device explicitly to look into 'destinations'. It does that automatically. That also means that the VCF files must necessarily be in the 'destinations' folder. You cannot put them elsewhere.

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    3. Dieser Kommentar wurde vom Autor entfernt.

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  4. Thanks, this works great. However, there are some issues with some of my entries. If I put them all in separate files, it works fine. But if I merge the files into one, it fails to read all of it. It's about 25 adresses and locations. Do you know if there is a maximum number of POI's per file?

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    1. Happy to hear that the tool is useful for you! I am not aware that putting more than one entry into a single file works at all. I haven't tried that myself, so I can't tell if there is a limitation.

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  5. Perfect Tool! Many thanks for providing it for free.
    It works with RNS 510 as well, so I'm happy :-)

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  6. Find the latest Volkswagen VW navigation system map updates here ✓ Most recent maps ✓ New POI's including new roads, businesses, addresses and much more. https://automotosoftware.com/product-category/volkswagen/

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  7. Der Kommentar wurde von einem Blog-Administrator entfernt.

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