Bearing on map ok, wrong on compass

"It looks like a problem in "heading" value, because sun and also arrow that points to guided point (on first two screenshots) seems to be correct, but whole rose is incorrectly rotated."

It looks exactly like that.

Can I install the free Version beside the Pro version?

Cheers

AWo

The beta/free version linked above doesn't fix my issue (compass demented, tiny arrow on map as expected), so clearly they're different issues. I'll leave this conversation to let it stay on-topic.

That makes absolutely......

....sense to me.

Fine. Answered. Thanks a lot for your efforts, again. Thumbsup!

Cheers

AWo

(Friendly) disagree...but ooh well that's this discussion for I suppose. Does not really hurt me as my most used phone has no inbuilt compass. Damm...in a next phone I should heat up the soldering iron to remove ? LOL.

I still disagree, but it's "not a hill I'm willing to die on", and I do appreciate you taking the time to consider this, thank you. Perhaps if more people vote, it can be reconsidered in the future.

In the meantime, hopefully you'll clarify the wording on the Sensors dialog.

@Viajero.

Sure I do understand the view point of the Locus_team. But I also do notice magnetic compass reliability is so so (delicate). Very large unreliable deviations mostly by bad operation usage practice by a magnetic flip case for example. Anyway my Samsungs are +/-reliable after a calibrate. Ace +/-wobbly and Ace2 stable and sure are usefull but very precise ?

Rotating the phones horizontally in plus and minus 90° steps not always result in exactly same direction indication. Not as a precise "robust" indication by my "no hardware magnetic compass" used chinese phone, only at movement of course.

Have a phone with magnetic compass ? Want compass rose view and Sun indicator to compare. Only option = USE. Q: How your BV6000 is performing ? I always "wave calibrate" by the well known 8 movement before operation. When In the field best out of public sight, otherwise people do think the guy is going "nuts".

I'll get in the habit of doing the "compass wave". Maybe that'll make it work better when I'm driving to some parking coords. The phone works great BTW, other than the magnetic compass sometimes going nuts, probably because I never do the compass wave.

Thanks again.

Hello, thanks for the interesting discussion.

I have used Garmin devices for a long time too, both for hiking and for sailing, then I tried apps on Android but I was not satisfied, until I finally found Locus and started using it regularly.

My experience both on Garmin devices and on smartphones is that the electronic compasses - even the best ones - are not as good as GPS signal to get the direction I am moving along, even at very low speeds: they always introduce some mistake, even just after multiple recalibrations.

So, the only situation they are really useful if when I am absolutely motionless and cannot use GPS signal to deduce my orientation.

Therefore I always configure apps and devices to only use GPS for orientation: in Locus I found this configuration in Sensors > Orientation > Orientation via GPS, but it does not look to work as expected when the compass panel is shown.

I use a lot the compass rose: in my opinion that is the best panel when sailing, but I often use it even when hiking (I have also asked for more information to be included in it if possible, see: http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/azimuth-and-direction-to-destination-point-in-compass-panel ) especially when I have a target point to reach.

So I agree with what Viajero expressed both here and at http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/orientation-by-gps-simply-does-not-work

For how I use Locus, it would be best if also the compass panel could be set to actually use GPS signal only, not the electronic compass, to determine the moving direction when the App is configured to do so.

Thanks

Hello,

I finally found the answer to what I thought was a bug - maybe because that's the way GPS devices usually work and I'm used to it.

For what it's worth, I would also prefer that I could use "orientation via GPS" with the compass rose as it's pretty usefull to navigate off road. But I can definitely live with the setting as is, I just found it quite confusing.

Regards,

François

Ah, after some exploring it seems that the required behaviour IS an option, but just not one that is available through the user interface.

To set compass screen to use GPS course rather than hardware compass we need to edit the switch in file "locus/config.cfg".

Look for:

gui_compass_use_compass_settings=0

And change to 1:

gui_compass_use_compass_settings=1

Then, as the switch name suggests, the compass screen will use GPS setting from App. Great!

There is also an option to set the compass screen to use white background.

Also looked for but didn't find:

- a switch to choose to NOT display roll and tilt information (distracting and not useful for the use cases I have)

- any way of editing the data fields that show beneath compass

- any way of making the data fields easier to read (bigger, clearer text)

For boating / kayaking use often the phone is used in a waterproof case in very poor and difficult conditions. So once we have a target set the only important information is: direction we are going relative to where we want to be going, how fast are we going, distance to go. All else is distraction.

Great app though. I tried (with frustration) dozens of GPS apps before settling on Locus. Thank you to the developers.

Three years later...

Did gui_compass_use_compass_settings=1 (described just above) stop working in LM4?

That beautiful compass screen is once again useless to me, other than for the sun indicator. My magnetic compass is pretty bad and resists my attempts to calibrate, and I wish I could destroy it somehow so Locus would ignore it.

Hello, I'm checking the code and it should still work correctly. Condition to make this work correctly is also "Map rotation mode" settings set to "Orientation via GPS", so please check it.

Hi. Thanks for checking the code. I had it set to auto-change, but now I've got it as GPS only. At first I thought that fixed it for me, now I'm not so sure. Maybe it needs a significant movement to spin the rose; walking pace, a few metres at a time, maybe not.

I've got a caching trip coming up; I'll keep an eye on it.

On my caching trip, I had set orientation-via-GPS, use true bearing = yes, compatibility mode = off, and location filter = no filter. Sometimes it worked as expected, sometimes not.

I walked some distance directly east along a fence. The compass rose was oriented properly. Then I turned the corner and started walking north. Now the rose did NOT align to my new direction. I walked 55m, with the indicated distance-to-cache slowly decreasing a few metres at a time, before suddenly the rose spun around to the right orientation.

Interestingly, I also lost the direction arrow during this time (which I've mentioned before), so this seems related. The programmer in me wonders, is there an uninitialized variable going into the smoothing algorithm? A bad value would eventually disappear from the average, say after 55m of walking. Just an idea.

Thanks for the tests. App currently display moving arrow in case, GPS unit reports "moving" > this means speed is non-zero. This value (speed) is anyway not from coordinates, but directly computed by the system. So, there are situations when signal quality is not ideal and movement speed is slow, that system report no-speed.

And also because of this, orientation does not work perfectly at low speeds. And also because of this exists option to automatically change between internal compass and GPS orientation. Because you have problems with internal compass, expect incorrect orientations in some situations ...