Storing Google Maps routes on your Garmin Handheld
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007So, I set out last night to store this route in Bear Valley, CA from Google Maps onto my Garmin Vista Cx handheld. We’re probably going to be walking that route, and I wanted to make sure that we don’t get lost.
The first step is to take the URL from above, and postpend “&output=kml” to it, and save that as a file called something like “bv.kml”. Taking a look at the KML file, I can see that its got a sequence of Placemark entries with directions, as well as a LineString that has the actual detailed route. What I want to do is take the LineString segment, turn it into a GPX Track, and load that Track onto my Garmin.
As far as I can tell, gpsbabel can’t translate the LineString into a Track inside a GPX file. It will output the Placemark entries into GPX, which is good, but it doesn’t seem to be able to do the Route.
The good part is that the LineString is an easy to understand format, so I just hand-crafted a GPX file with a track that has those coordinates. Then, I used gpsbabel to upload to my Vista Cx. Voila! I’ve got the track stored and I can use the GPS to follow it! Here’s the gpsbabel commandline that I used:
# rmmod garmin_gps
# gpsbabel -r -t -i gpx bv3.gpx -o garmin -F usb:
