DIY Printed Garmin Maps

[GBW]

I have Garmin Topo Australia on my Etrex but for whatever reason dont have printing permission for the maps from within Basecamp. Now you can take a screen shot but the image size is pretty small and I found you needed to zoom way in to get any detail which reduced the coverage.

My solution was to take several screenshots and join them together, highlite the contours/water, draw a grid and this way produce images 5000+ pixels wide/high for printing.

I have some programming skills so the process is mostly automated from within a small app I wrote for Windows which takes the screen shot, moves the map and stitches them all together. then by using two waypoints in the top left and bottom right corners calculate and draw the grid.

Needs some minor tweaking but so far I'm pretty pleased with the results. Any feedback welcome.

Heres a sample image which is greatly reduced in size from the original so it could fit on this forum:

Attachments

Demo map

[Zone-5]

Perhaps someone can explain why maps are able to be printed here like this image below???

[icefest]

Would it be presumptuous to ask for a copy of the program?

[Strider]

Basecamp is available free online

[Zone-5]

Would it be presumptuous to ask for a copy of the program?

Basecamp is available free online

I think he means the 'Print' app developed by the OP, not the commercial Basecamp program itself...

[icefest]

I think he means the 'Print' app developed by the OP, not the commercial Basecamp program itself...

I do.

[keithy]

Wow, that's a good effort. I had considered something similar, but a manual stitching process was not something I wanted to embark on. What do your gridlines correspond with?

Perhaps someone can explain why maps are able to be printed here like this image below???

Some maps allow printing via Basecamp. Oztopo for example, I believe still allows printing out via Basecamp. AFAIK, if you have the Garmin topo maps on either SD card or downloadable versions, Basecamp will not print them out. I believe that if you have the DVD version though, you can print maps out. I haven't tested this out yet though.

GBW - do you intend on making your screenshot/stitch app available?

[GBW]

Icefest/Keithy, I'd give you a copy but at the moment it's a bit like the flux capacitor...if you don't have a DeLorean it probably wont work. I'd need to make some mods to allow for different screen resolutions or make those parameters user definable so the cropped images match up perfectly but I'll have a think about it.

By the way, I'm not a programmer, it's just a hobby of mine, but I do love maps and that was the inspiration.

Keithy, if you look closely at the image above you'll notice two coordinates near the top/left and bottom/right. Thats all you need to calculate the gridlines based on number of pixels between the two points. Right mouse click on the image and enter a coordinate.

I'm progessively mapping out the areas of interest to me but if there's any areas you want let me know.

Garmin maps have some reasonable features like contours, water, tracks but it's a shame some other topographic features like cliffs etc arent displayed. Also the labelling is terrible and there's no gridlines.

Here's a screenshot of the app in action.

Attachments

[keithy]

Icefest/Keithy, I'd give you a copy but at the moment it's a bit like the flux capacitor...if you don't have a DeLorean it probably wont work. I'd need to make some mods to allow for different screen resolutions or make those parameters user definable so the cropped images match up perfectly but I'll have a think about it.

That makes sense. Still, nice work on the app. Looks great. What resolution screen are you taking the grabs from?

[Zone-5]

Visual basic?