Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 25 Location: California
How to you find a Starbucks with the new GO 720? Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:09 am
I've had my 720 for just a few hours now. The Nav part is working well. I have some questions on the POI searching:
1) I've tried to find a starbucks to no avail. I've tried closed to me, and City Search. I've even used Los Angeles as the city. Still it says no POI found. McDonalds and other places seem to work OK. Why can't it seem to find a Starbucks in Southern Calif? There are lots of them.
2) When I use a City search, and put in a name (like McDonalds), it sorts them by distance from the center of the City, not from my actual location. This occurs even when I am in the same city. Any workarounds?
I'd prefer to find the closest one to me.
1) POIs are an interesting thing. People generally expect that since the road database is nearly 100% complete, that the POI database should be the same. While the mapping companies know about nearly 100% of the POIs, GPS manufacturers choose to only include a small portion of them on devices. There are roughly 15-20 million POIs in the USA, while most GPS devices only have about 1-5 million on them. The 720 has about 5 million POIs which means that about three out of four POIs won't be in the database. I don't know how they determine which ones to include, but that would be interesting to find out.
2) Don't use the city search. From the Menu, go to Navigate to -> Point of Interest -> POI near you -> Restaurant -> Find -> "mcdonald". Then it should sort them by closest distance to you.
Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 25 Location: California
Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:31 am
OK, #2 worked great. Thanks.
Now that I have the list, is there any way to see which direction they are? I had 4 McDonalds listed all about 2 miles away, but you couldn't tell what direction they were in. My Honda nav has a little arrow pointing to the direction.
No. But if you are navigating a route, it will show you which ones are directly along your route (green diversion icon), which ones are a slight deviation from your route (yellow diversion icon), and which ones are further off the route (no icon).
The assumption (perhaps not valid) is probably that if you are not navigating an existing route then you probably don't care which direction the POI is.
If you want a Starbucks POI list for your TomTom, I downloaded an existing Garmin POI file from here, then converted it to the TomTom format. You can download the TomTom POI files for Starbucks based on that data. I think there are just shy of 9,000 USA locations in that file. For installation instructions, consult this document.
Last edited by Tim on Sat Aug 18, 2007 3:55 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 12 Jul 2007 Posts: 544 Location: Bloomington, Il
Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:12 pm
Tim wrote:
If you want a Starbucks POI list for your TomTom, I downloaded an existing Garmin POI file from [cut]
I thought TomTom had additional POIs that could be downloaded. It seems a bit convoluted to have to go to some other web site and download them in another format and then convert to TomTom format.
I think this whole topic of POIs is one we all need to know more about, especially with the 720 having user customizable and shareable POIs. The link you provided works for Starbucks but where does one go for others?
They do, here, but there are not very many to pick from. However what they offer is more than other manufacturers who for the most part say "go find them on other websites".
There is also a tendency of retail chains to not want to give out a database of their store locations, they want people to go to their website instead.
Joined: 12 Jul 2007 Posts: 544 Location: Bloomington, Il
Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:42 pm
That is a fairly short list. I wonder about WiFi hot spots? They seem to have databases for Europe but not for the U.S. Is there somewhere one can go to download a good listing of U.S. WiFi hot spots? Hopefully this would just be the free ones because someone who charges should have their own databases people can go to. Or is this like truck scales, something that the users will have to create and then share?
(As an aside, I'm still amazed that nobody has created a PND especially for truckers with truck routes and scales and truck stops showing.)
The hotspot listing for the USA is fourth in the list, "JiWire Hotspots USA", or use the direct link here. It includes both free and paid locations. There are about 27,000 locations in the USA listed.
Lots of truckers have commercial grade devices and products running, negating the use for consumer level PNDs. There is also laptop based software called co-pilot which offers GPS navigation and is a product designed specifically for truckers.
Joined: 12 Jul 2007 Posts: 544 Location: Bloomington, Il
Wed Aug 01, 2007 12:19 am
Your link is good but if you click on the "Subscribe to the US version" it just takes you to a menu of options and that isn't on the list. In otherwise you end up in a loop. Hopefully the rest of their site works better.
Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 25 Location: California
Wed Aug 01, 2007 1:17 am
Tim wrote:
If you want a Starbucks POI list for your TomTom, I downloaded an existing Garmin POI file from here, then converted it to the TomTom format. You can download the TomTom POI files for Starbucks based on that data. I think there are just shy of 9,000 USA locations in that file. For installation instructions, consult this document.
I copied that file over to my 720, and it worked great! I now have a nice list of Starbucks. They do come over as thier own category, so you don't see them listed with the other restaurants, but for me that should work OK. Strange that TomTom didn't include them. At least they seemed to have left them all out, so adding in this file doesn't seem to have any duplicates.
One question though: I added them to the internal memory per instructions. Is there a way to add more POI to an SD card once I get one, or is the SD card just for new maps, music, photos and such? Also, can I get one of the new 4 GB SDHC cards to work in the 720?
If you put something on an SD card, then everything (maps, application, POIs, voices, etc) seems to need to be on the SD card. In other words it is an either/or situation. Either you are running everything from the internal memory or you are running everything from the SD card.
Joined: 12 Jul 2007 Posts: 544 Location: Bloomington, Il
Thu Aug 02, 2007 1:46 pm
Tim wrote:
Ed, I didn't do anything fancy there. I just took the source file which was already CSV, then used grep/regex to to put it in a format TomTom likes.
I don't know about everyone else but that is totally Greek to me. What the heck is grep/regex?
Normally to change format on an object you need a computer program that can read one format and then convert it to another format. Does such a program comew with the 720? If not, where do you get it?
Sorry, I chose poor wording there. It is Greek! Basically that means I didn't use a "program" in the traditional sense. I don't have a program I could point you to or you could download. I scripted my own.
TomTom does have a very crude set of tools for creating POI files based on CSV files, but I haven't used them.
Joined: 12 Jul 2007 Posts: 544 Location: Bloomington, Il
Thu Aug 02, 2007 7:21 pm
That is great info! I followed your link to the source of additional POI databases. There are quite a few categories EXCEPT only 5 in the USA and none in the USA since 2002. Hopefully Mapshare will correct this major deficiency in POIs in the U.S.
I for one plan to aggressively add all of the new POIs I can find in my area, particularly new restaurants & Hotel/Motels as there have been lots of new ones lately. I hope others do the same so that all TomTom 720 (and perhaps other TomTom users) can benefit.
I've started to thread asking people what their biggest needs are for tools related to creating and adding custom POI databases. If you have any input, please come over to this other thread and let me know your experiences. Thanks.
Last edited by Tim on Sun Nov 11, 2007 1:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
If you want a Starbucks POI list for your TomTom, I downloaded an existing Garmin POI file from here, then converted it to the TomTom format. You can download the TomTom POI files for Starbucks based on that data. I think there are just shy of 9,000 USA locations in that file. For installation instructions, consult this document.
wow, even using the guide, I can not figure out how to move this file to my 720. Is there an easier guide anywhere?
Just drop the OV2 , plus the optional BMP file, into the map folder - forget about Home. You can put up to 99 OV2 files (the new limit is 300 with Navcore 7, if I am not mistaken).
Just drop the OV2 , plus the optional BMP file, into the map folder - forget about Home. You can put up to 99 OV2 files (the new limit is 300 with Navcore 7, if I am not mistaken).
I hate to say it, but I dont know what/where the map folder even is.
When you connect your TT to your computer via USB, it should show up as an additional "drive" on your computer. Open up the drive and in there you should see a folder called "North_America_2GB" or something like that. Open up that folder and drop the OV2 and BMP files in there.
Or USA_and_Canada, which has less details & POI than the North_America.
For other countries, it will be something like France, Australia, New_Zealand...
You can't miss unless you got 'F' for Geography.
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From the Menu, go to Navigate to -> Point of Interest -> 
