[WIP] TruckSim Navigator: a route advisor for your tablet / phone

[truckermudgeon]

Hey all, sorry for the radio silence: I was on holiday for a couple of weeks, and am only now able to catch up on map-related things

For those interested in running the Navigator themselves: I've started a wiki on the repo, and added a Running TruckSim Navigator page. Please have a read and give any feedback you can, so I can continue to improve it (all I know right now is, "well, these directions work for me! " But I'm sure I'm probably missing/forgetting some important detail).

@hoseclamp72 yikes, not sure why you ran into the client crashing... my wild guess it's related to timestamps: if your computer's clock is off / differs from my server's clock by more than 30 seconds, then the client handshake will fail. But it sounds like you haven't run into any problems on your main PC? If you run into any more problems, then please try starting the client from the command line, so that any error messages printed are preserved.

Also: I'm sad to hear about the display timeout issue. I haven't run into it with my iPad, but I'll try and see if I can borrow a friend's Android tablet to test things out.

About the QR code not appearing on the client anymore: yeah, the pairing flow is a bit wonky. It only shows the QR code if the client is unknown to the server: presumably, you should be able to reopen the navigator site on a previously-paired browser, and it'll just "remember" all the settings. But it sounds like that's not the case . At any rate, I'm working on a new client that will always display a fresh QR code, so you'll have one ready to use "just in case".

@TwinShadow : my server logs are only retained for 7 days, so unfortunately, I can't go back and search for what might have caused your connection to close. I also couldn't find anything, in any of the libraries I'm using, about error code 238. Please let me know if it happens again!

[Bandit & The Snowman]

iPhones and iPads are different from (some?) Android devices as it seems, because they have a central setting for display timeout that allows you to turn it completely off.

[TwinShadow]

For those interested in running the Navigator themselves: I've started a wiki on the repo, and added a Running TruckSim Navigator page. Please have a read and give any feedback you can, so I can continue to improve it (all I know right now is, "well, these directions work for me! " But I'm sure I'm probably missing/forgetting some important detail).

Now that's going to be a project in itself. lol - Good thing I'm already familiar with terminal since I have a Debian VPS right now. (though I need to think about changing the distro at some point, but I don't know what to atm...) I'm also going to have to do some reverse proxy in whatever webserver I'm using. I just have to remember if it's Apache or nginx that I'm using because it's been a hot minute since I messed with it for something else I run on there.

Providing I'm not beat to it, if I can get it working, I'll post a sort of template for Apache users for reverse proxy, and maybe with SSL too since I have a Let's Encrypt cert I use. Can never be too cautious these days. Though I won't get into details on how to actually do SSL certs since that's beyond the scope of this. On the bright side, at least a basic config can be relatively copied for nginx and adpated for it.

@TwinShadow : my server logs are only retained for 7 days, so unfortunately, I can't go back and search for what might have caused your connection to close. I also couldn't find anything, in any of the libraries I'm using, about error code 238. Please let me know if it happens again!

I've been bouncing between CachyOS and Windows for a bit, so next time I run into that disconnect with your server, I'll make a post again. I'm just not sure if it may have been a network timeout or something odd like that since I've not had any network issues and it suddenly disconnecting while I was driving was pretty quick to notice.

[hoseclamp72]

I decided it wasn't worth all the trouble running this on Android at the moment, so I am now instead running through my home server. I installed Opera to use as a dedicated browser to run Navigator and my ELD through (my normal browser is Edge) and things are working absolutely fantastic this way. I also purchased a 7" portable monitor on Amazon which is dedicated to the Navigator, and am quite pleased with the results.

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[truckermudgeon]

iPhones and iPads are different from (some?) Android devices as it seems, because they have a central setting for display timeout that allows you to turn it completely off.

I have a running joke with my colleagues at my day job, where we're given all the same equipment to program on: "development would be so much easier if we didn't have any customers ".

Not having a device setting to keep a display always-on sounds wild to me... but maybe it's a setting only a small percentage of people would use, so isn't worth adding? Decision-making in software can be complicated.

I still have no ideas on why the telemetry client might suddenly disconnect unexpectedly... but I'll continue giving it some thought / adding more logging to the code.

In the meantime: I've fixed a couple of bugs related to connections, and hopefully it covers the reason why @hoseclamp72 ran into constant disconnections upon pairing. I guess we'll see

[truckermudgeon]

I've just added proper support for phones (and I've updated this thread's title + first post to be less tablet-specific )

iphone.png

[hoseclamp72]

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Is it possible to relocate the TruckSim Maps text that links to the Github page? My fat fingers like to hit it nstead when I attempt to press the Search bnutton.

[truckermudgeon]

whoops, sorry about that: i've changed it so the text remains, but it's no longer clickable. i'll have a proper link to the repo when i implement a settings + about page.

thanks for bringing this up: revisiting the hit target sizes of everything is something i need to do... personally, i've found that the buttons in the "destination reached" popup are hard to tap at times.

[hoseclamp72]

Stumbled upon a translation error ...

GPS

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In game location
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[truckermudgeon]

Thanks for the report! Pretty sure I'm assuming an incorrect character encoding when reading the game's sign data... I'll have a fix out soon.