Tomtom POI Problem

Hi everyone,

I am having a little problem with inputting POI's into my Tomtom App.

I have a Palm TT3, and I am using Tomtom 4.40 with their bluetooth receiver.

I am trying to put some POI's into Tomtom and I got it to work the other day but now whenever I try to start the program it freezes on me.

I am gettings pocket queries from geocaching.com and they have listings of 500 caches within the gpx file. I used GSAK and imported the gpx and then exported as a ov2 file. I dropped the ov2 file and the bmp file into the map folder on my SD card and everything started up fine and was working.

Yesterday, I got a new pocket query for another area of California that had 500 new caches in it, but there is no overlap between the caches. So no I export a ov2 file from GSAK that has 1000 caches in it. I remove the old ov2 file from the map folder in my SD card and drop the new ov2 in the folder. That is when the freezing started.

If I remove the ov2 files then Tomtom will start up fine. But if I put any ov2 file in the map folder Tomtom will freeze, even the original 500 cache ov2 file that used to work.

Any idea's? I could try reinstalling the program but that is going to be a pain I am sure since I am a Mac user and I have to startup Virtual PC in order to do that because Tomtom has decided to make an installer instead of just giving out the .prc file in a compressed archive.

Well thanks for reading and I hope to hear back from someone soon.

Ok, well lets do a little update.

I formatted the card and reinstalled and that didn't have any effect. Any ov2 file that I put in the map folder will freeze Tomtom and I have to do a soft reset to get my T3 working again. I have tried putting the just the ov2 file in the map folder and not the bmp file and that also had not effect, it still freezes up on me.

Does anyone have any idea on what to do? I am getting pretty upset about this. First figuring out that I can add POI's on my own and then being able to do it and see that it works. Within a day it is no longer working and I have no idea why. It is like getting a gift and having it taken away from you for no reason. Ehhhhh, time for some sleep, I have been trying to figure this out for too long now.

[Charlie]

Sounds to me like there are too many POIs in the ov2 file. Try something with less POIs in it if possible..

Thanks for the reply Charlie.

I figured the same thing so I tested that out. In GSAK I put a filter on my database so it only showed me the 500 closest POI's, I exported those results into an ov2 and loaded it in my map folder and I still got the same results. I found that odd because I know that 500 POI's should be fine since I had only that loaded originally and it worked.

I saw on another thread that someone was talking about having 2000 POI's loaded at the same time. He didn't say if they were all in the same ov2 file but he did say he was using GSAK and geocachings Pocket Queries so I would assume that they were all in one file.

Quick Update. I put a filter on GSAK again and exported an ov2 file that only had 13 POI's. Tomtom still froze while booting up.

[Charlie]

Very strange, got me stumped.

A long shot but, how much free space do you have on the SD card?

I solved the problem!

Charlie don't worry about this one, it had something to do with my setup and you probably will never run into the problem again. But just incase let me explain what the problem was.

Like I said before I am using a Mac and emulating windows to use GSAK and other GPS programs. Well I would export ov2 files to the PC desktop and them drag them onto the Mac desktop. I noticed that once the files appeared on the Mac desktop they had a weird txt file icon and I figured that was how they were supposed to look on my Mac. But then I created POI category in Tomtom and dragged the ov2 file that Tomtom created onto my Mac desktop and it did not have the same icon as the GSAK created ov2. Even though they were both ov2 files and were listed as such there was something taking place during the transfer from PC to Mac. So I created a shared folder in Virtual PC and linked it to my Mac desktop, making windows think that my Mac desktop was a network HD (it sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, really it was just the click of a button) and I dropped the GSAK ov2 file onto the network drive. The ov2 file appeared on my Mac desktop but it had the same icon as the Tomtom created ov2, not the generic txt file icon. I loaded it onto my card (which BTW has 400 megs available) and everything worked.

I now have an ov2 file that has 2500 POI Geocaches.

So there you have it. I scoured the internet and GPS forums looking for similar problems and tried every little possible solution. I guess I am one of the few Tomtom, GSAK, VPC users out there so I couldn't find anyone else experiencing this problem. Oh Well, it works and I have tons of new POI's.

Thanks for helping out Charlie.

Hello,

Does anyone know how i can read the .ova files, i would like to edit some of them and merge info

Thanks

[mikealder]

Not too sure about using a MAC but if you can boot into Windows using Parallels etc then look at POIEdit Here - Mike