🗺️ Onboard Maps

Note

EDUCATIONAL PROJECT DISCLAIMER

This project is developed purely for educational and demonstrative purposes. While it aims to provide useful public transport information for Milan, it relies on data sources, including scraping information from giromilano.atm.it.

The terms of service for ATM (Azienda Trasporti Milanesi) regarding data usage are not explicitly clear, and this project may potentially violate them.

Therefore:

• Use at Your Own Risk: We do not guarantee the accuracy or continued availability of the data, nor do we assume responsibility for any consequences arising from its use.
• Unscheduled Discontinuation: This project, or parts of it, may be taken down or become non-functional unexpectedly if ATM's policies change or if the data sources become inaccessible.

We advise caution and understanding of these limitations.

This repository contains the custom raster tiles and the tools used to generate them for the Onboard Project maps. These maps cover the urban area of Milan, Italy, extending towards Bergamo, providing a visually rich and detailed backdrop for transport information.

📷 Why Raster Tiles?

We utilize raster tiles in this project because flutter_map offers robust and performant native support for them across all target platforms (Windows, Android, Web). While vector tiles are often lighter and faster, their cross-platform compatibility and stability within flutter_map are still evolving.

Note

Our goal is to switch to vector tiles as soon as a stable and performant cross-platform solution becomes readily available in flutter_map.

✨ Key Features

• Custom Map Tiles: Provides a unique visual style tailored for public transport visualization.
• Milan & Bergamo Coverage: Tiles are generated for the specific geographic extent relevant to the Onboard Project.
• Light & Dark Themes: Includes pre-generated tiles for both light and dark UI themes.
• Automated Generation: Contains scripts to automate the process of sourcing, styling, and downloading map tiles.

⚠️ Important Considerations

Caution

This project serves educational and demonstration purposes. The map tiles are hosted via GitHub Pages, which is NOT designed for high-traffic public tile serving.

If you intend to use these tiles in a production environment or for extensive access, please clone this repository and host/serve them on your own infrastructure.

🔄 Updating/Generating Tiles

To update the existing tiles or generate your own custom set:

Tip

1. Ensure you have tileserver-gl and protomaps installed globally on your system.
2. Verify that you have a Python virtual environment set up within this repository's folder.
3. If you want to change the geographic area covered by the tiles, remember to adjust the extent in both serve_tiles.bat (for tileserver-gl bounding box) and main.py (for the Python download script).

Follow these steps (in Windows command prompt):

1. Start the Tile Server:

   serve_tiles.bat

   Wait for the server to be ready and verify its availability by navigating to http://localhost:8080 in your web browser.

2. Download the Tiles: While tileserver-gl is running, open a new command prompt and run:

   download_tiles.bat

   This script will connect to your local tileserver-gl instance and download the pre-styled raster tiles into the appropriate light and dark directories.

🛠️ Development Setup (Optional)

If you need to delve into the Python script or batch files:

1. Clone the Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/onboard-project/maps.git
   cd maps

2. Create Virtual Environment:

   python -m venv venv
   # On Windows:
   .\venv\Scripts\activate
   # On macOS/Linux:
   source venv/bin/activate

3. Install Python Dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

🤝 Contributing

We welcome improvements to our map generation process or new styling suggestions! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 License.