In this post, I will show how to export background maps (as a set of MBTiles files) from QGIS 3 and import them in Geopaparazzi on Android to serve as backup offline hiking maps when far from civilization and mobile coverage.

It can be useful in France, where interesting maps to have while hiking are the IGN ones like Carte Topographique IGN (Scan 25) or their standard map (Scan Express Standard). They are accessible freely through the Geoportail mobile app. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t support offline mode.

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A few weeks ago, I updated my Freehand Raster Georeferencer plugin for the newly released QGIS 3. I also included a few fixes for some issues as well as new features such as uniform scaling, a new “Georeference with 2 Points” tool (contributed by a user) or taking into account an existing world file. Those changes were backported to the plugin version for QGIS 2 so there should not be any difference between the QGIS 2 and 3 versions. See the updated doc for information.

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Innov-Agri is a large outdoor trade fair for agricultural machinery and equipment. In 2016, it took place in a field near Orléans. A lot of constructors were there and offered live demonstrations of their products. The company I work for was an exhibitor so I went there on the first day of the fair. I walked around and took a few pictures.

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Some time ago, I released a plugin for QGIS called “Freehand Raster Georeferencer” that allows interactive raster georeferencing. It implements some tools (move, rotate, scale, stretch…) to manipulate a raster directly on the map, on top of the other layers. This is in contrast with the standard raster georeferencing tool of QGIS, which needs control points and then an export to be able to check the georeferencing.

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Some time ago, I saw this article about using the Qgis2threejs plugin to export a QGIS map as a 3D visualisation in the browser, thanks to three.js and WebGL. When I recently tried to follow the post to reproduce the results, I had some problem sourcing the data (related to Vienna, Austria) so instead I searched for data related to Paris to create a similar scene. Here is the result corresponding to the screenshot above and another one with aerial photos, both showing the Montmartre area of Paris.

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I released a free app called Tokyo Ramen Map a few weeks ago on the Play Store. It is a simple map application showing all the ramen restaurants in central Tokyo, along with ratings. I built it for my needs so it is quite bare bones. The main point was to make it work offline since I don’t have a data connection outside my apartment.

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Android has added support for Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth Smart) and thus iBeacon (a profile of BLE) in version 4.3. However, on my Google Nexus 10 (2012 edition, now running Android 4.4 aka KitKat), support is disabled in the official version provided by Google, even though the hardware supports it. Since I want to try out (and maybe develop) apps that use iBeacons, that makes me very sad… Thankfully, there is a way to enable it, by replacing the original Bluetooth-related libraries on the device with patched libraries that add support for Bluetooth Low Energy.

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Recently, I have been researching techniques for indoor positioning, where GPS does not work. Although it is not widely deployed yet, one technology that looks quite interesting is called “iBeacon”, an Apple-designed (and currently unofficially documented) profile of Bluetooth Low Energy.

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