Rat
Well-known member
As a geocacher I was irritated that neither the in-car GPS system nor Carwings had a way to input waypoints by latitude and longitude. Reading over the related thread on route planning, though, I discovered that it's relatively easy. Google Maps accepts latitude/longitude waypoints and displays them on the map. You can then send them to your car as specified in the previous thread. There are a few fine points with this method, though.
First you have to do it in Google Maps, which for those of you with a smart phone is no big deal, but for those of us with only a desktop at home, you can't do that in the field. Next, geocachers typically want to put several points into the system and not specify a route or order. You could download each of them, hit pause, and add to route, then at the end save the current route, which is a bit cumbersome and leaves you with a fixed route which may not be the way you want to go. We often skip one waypoint or decide to do them in a different order depending on various factors. So after I found a series of four on Google Maps and sent them to the car, and then figured out to download them from Google Maps, I saved each one as a destination, only to find that saving them apparently only prevents them from being deleted from the Google Maps car storage server after downloading. It does NOT save them in the car unit even though you are pushing the save button there.
What I just did in preparation for tomorrow's geocaching trip is (in my garage) to download the Google Maps feed, hit pause on the first one, set as destination, wait until it sets the destination and starts telling me the navigation, then go back and start the Google Maps feed again, when it starts playing destination 1, push the down arrow to get destination 2, repeating the process using that as the new destination, and so on through all four. Then I canceled navigation and then started it again and pushed the previous destinations button. All four locations are now stored there. I could have just done this one by one tomorrow if I knew for sure I would have a cell phone connection the whole way, but I can be pretty sure I won't since I'll be up on Summit Road in Los Gatos/San Lorenzo area which is mountainous, sparsely populated, and heavily wooded. This way they are all in the car and I can choose them in whatever order I want. As long as the car can get a GPS signal pretty reliably (which it should up there), then it can navigate without needing to connect to the information center to get the next destination.
A note of caution. When using Google Maps this way, it resolves to the nearest road address to send to the Leaf since apparently the Leaf's system isn't sophisticated enough to do that. I.e., it calculates in On Road mode not Off Road for those of you familiar with handheld units, which makes sense for a car-based system. That means it may not always pick the right road location, especially if the coordinates are on a frontage road to a freeway, for example, or deep in a park of any kind. You may want the nearest parking lot, not the nearest road, and certainly don't want to be told you're arriving at your destination on the freeway going 65. So look on the Google map display first, i.e. before sending the car, and be sure the location highlighted is on the street you want. If it has the wrong location, such as the nearest road (but where you can't stop or park), I use Google Earth street view to get a street address nearby where I do want to stop or park and input that.
A second problem is that it seems to name them only according to street address or street name. Although you can give each one a name (e.g. general store, Los Trancos Park) in the Note field on Google Maps, and that name is read out by the voice at the end of each repetition at the time of downloading, that does not display in the car menu. The display just has the "address" and street, so it is a bit difficult to know which one you are choosing when you select it as the next destination. I also managed to download a Carwings route with all of them in the order I think I am going to do them, but I am not certain what happens if I decide to skip one of I try to jump into that route while I'm halfway done. Does anyone have any experience with that?
First you have to do it in Google Maps, which for those of you with a smart phone is no big deal, but for those of us with only a desktop at home, you can't do that in the field. Next, geocachers typically want to put several points into the system and not specify a route or order. You could download each of them, hit pause, and add to route, then at the end save the current route, which is a bit cumbersome and leaves you with a fixed route which may not be the way you want to go. We often skip one waypoint or decide to do them in a different order depending on various factors. So after I found a series of four on Google Maps and sent them to the car, and then figured out to download them from Google Maps, I saved each one as a destination, only to find that saving them apparently only prevents them from being deleted from the Google Maps car storage server after downloading. It does NOT save them in the car unit even though you are pushing the save button there.
What I just did in preparation for tomorrow's geocaching trip is (in my garage) to download the Google Maps feed, hit pause on the first one, set as destination, wait until it sets the destination and starts telling me the navigation, then go back and start the Google Maps feed again, when it starts playing destination 1, push the down arrow to get destination 2, repeating the process using that as the new destination, and so on through all four. Then I canceled navigation and then started it again and pushed the previous destinations button. All four locations are now stored there. I could have just done this one by one tomorrow if I knew for sure I would have a cell phone connection the whole way, but I can be pretty sure I won't since I'll be up on Summit Road in Los Gatos/San Lorenzo area which is mountainous, sparsely populated, and heavily wooded. This way they are all in the car and I can choose them in whatever order I want. As long as the car can get a GPS signal pretty reliably (which it should up there), then it can navigate without needing to connect to the information center to get the next destination.
A note of caution. When using Google Maps this way, it resolves to the nearest road address to send to the Leaf since apparently the Leaf's system isn't sophisticated enough to do that. I.e., it calculates in On Road mode not Off Road for those of you familiar with handheld units, which makes sense for a car-based system. That means it may not always pick the right road location, especially if the coordinates are on a frontage road to a freeway, for example, or deep in a park of any kind. You may want the nearest parking lot, not the nearest road, and certainly don't want to be told you're arriving at your destination on the freeway going 65. So look on the Google map display first, i.e. before sending the car, and be sure the location highlighted is on the street you want. If it has the wrong location, such as the nearest road (but where you can't stop or park), I use Google Earth street view to get a street address nearby where I do want to stop or park and input that.
A second problem is that it seems to name them only according to street address or street name. Although you can give each one a name (e.g. general store, Los Trancos Park) in the Note field on Google Maps, and that name is read out by the voice at the end of each repetition at the time of downloading, that does not display in the car menu. The display just has the "address" and street, so it is a bit difficult to know which one you are choosing when you select it as the next destination. I also managed to download a Carwings route with all of them in the order I think I am going to do them, but I am not certain what happens if I decide to skip one of I try to jump into that route while I'm halfway done. Does anyone have any experience with that?