After messing around with AVIC FEEDS for a bit, I decided to ignore that and go play with the data in the nav unit itself. After creating a user POI with the built in interface, I went digging through the files to figure out where it's saved and in what format.

Turns out, it's a dirt-simple ascii flat file and you can populate it all you want on your computer then copy it back into the nav unit.

I have not put this to an 'acid test' as far as finding out what limitations there may be on file size / number of POIs, nor have I figured out what all the fields are yet. I have figured out some of the fields and successfully loaded it with my 50 or 60 'Landmarks' from my old GPS.

The file is located at (I think this is right....shoulda wrote it down):

\My Flash Drive\USER\UserData\iGo\save\user.upoi

The file is a simple delimited ascii file, with pipes ("|") as the delimiter. Here's an example:

#|Category Name|POI Name|?|Lat|Long|?|?|Post/Zip|City,Prov|Street Name|Street Num|?|?|?
25|Business|Quality Offset||43.64750|-79.66628|_c**|_con|L5T|Mississauga, ON|Kestrel Rd|6202|||

The first line I have added as a guideline, don't leave that in or you'll mess it up I'm sure. The second line shows actual data from my user.upoi file.

The first field is a number; it's a simple field number, starts at 0 and goes up. Second is the category name from your POI category list. Third is the name of the POI. Fourth, mine are all empty. Fifth is the latitude, expressed as DD.DDDDD and sixth is longitude, also expressed as DD.DDDDD

The seventh and eighth fields, I don't know what they mean, but might refer to the logo / icon. All of mine have the same icon (for now) and all of mine have those two bits of text in those fields. Ninth is the first 3 digits of the postal code, for USA it's probably the 5 digit zip code. Ten is the city,prov (or city,state) and then it's the street name, then street number. I do not know what the last three are, they are all blank for me.

As I said, I can confirm that you can load this file on a PC then copy it onto the nav unit and it will work. I had started out by entering two POIs directly on the nav, then edited my file to bring the number up to 50 or 60 then saved that back into the navi and the POIs show up on the map as you'd expect.

Still left to figure out: What all those empty fields are. What the _c** and _con do or mean. Verify how to do different icons / custom icons.

Cheers!

Still left to figure out: What all those empty fields are. What the _c** and _con do or mean.

Just a guess, but the _con might simply be the contact number associated with the POI. Many POIs have a telephone number listed. There may be a separate file that references the first field (#) to match up the phone number with the POI.

-Eric

I made a POI on mine and here is what was saved in my user.upoi file:

1|Test|Testpoint||33.764494|-116.310153|_u**|_ucx||near Palm Desert, CA|Unnamed road||||

I just saved it in an open area. I get _u** and _ucx on mine. Interesting. I really want to use the red light database and add it so they actually show up as red lights etc. Looks like its not far off.

There's a program called IGO8 User.upoi creator which can generate .upoi file from

From some reasearch... Apparently, IGO2006 format POIs could be saved into /content/userdata/poi folder.

.upoi file seems to have somewhat different format depending on the country where you are and whether the address is saved with the POI, but here's what could be found:

(No address)

1. - Number

2. Type (POI category)

3. Name

4. Looks like the icon branding pointer and/or category, subcategories dot-separated

5. Latitude

6. Longitude

7. -- 10. Not clear

11. Phone Number

12. Description

13. Extra Information

From other sources and with addresses:

7 - Unknown8. Country code. Pioneer seems to use _uxx for US/Canada but might be _CAN for something Canada-specific...

9. Unknowm

10. Postal Code start

11. City/Region

12. street

13. House #

14. Comments

15. Phone Number.

There also exists something called IGO POI Explorer Beta (written by someone form PDAMill/NavNGo) that can import from multiple formats and work on IGO.DB internal database directly.

Also, http://www.pdamill.com/~fable/poiconvert.exe has a POI converter that can import/export between IGO.KML and IGO.DB files.

BTW, in Stephanie's DATA.ZIP it looks like Mac adds resource fork files to the archive (a lot of ._Something files). They do not seem to confuse the head unit too much but certainly make the file much larger than it needs to be...

I made a POI on mine and here is what was saved in my user.upoi file:

 

1|Test|Testpoint||33.764494|-116.310153|_u**|_ucx||near Palm Desert, CA|Unnamed road||||

 

I just saved it in an open area. I get _u** and _ucx on mine. Interesting. I really want to use the red light database and add it so they actually show up as red lights etc. Looks like its not far off.

Based on this info, I'm going to guess that the _u** / _ucx is for a location in the USA and the _c** / _con is for a location in Canada? It might even be more detailed than that... _con could be Canada, ONtario...

Anyhow, food for thought. Maybe those fields aren't even necessary.

People say that fields 1,2,3,5,6 and 13 separators are necessary. everything else is optional.

I've been playing around some more, the fourth field is definately for the icon. If this field is blank, the POI gets the category icon. Otherwise what is in here is the icon name, of the specific one that is selected.

The only thing I'm stumped with at this stage is how to go about adding custom icons to the thing. I've edited the poi_mapclose.bmp and added a few icons to it, and (I think) I figured out how the .icon files work, so I added some .icon files for my new icons, but they don't appear as choices in the nav unit.

Edited to add: Ok I did figure out how the poi icons work. My problem was that there's so many rendunant files, I had updated two of them but a third one was hiding... found it and replaced it with my updates and now I can import POIs directly into my nav unit, and I can create custom icons for those POIs too! So I don't need that AVIC FEEDS software at all and don't need to leave an SD card in there all the time just to use custom POIs.

If anyone would like information on how the icon files work, just say so and I'll post it here.

Stephanie, Is there a way to get the Redlight and Speedcam POI (posted by leetcoder) to show up without using the SD card. I got it working using the SD card, which I would be fine with, but this method sometimes slows up the AVIC, and at other times just freezes it to a point.

POI extinctions on the AVIC flash drive are different formats then in the Redlight POI folder.

The upoi file is just an ascii flat file, so it's just a matter of converting the data from the kml format to the ascii format.

I don't know if there's a limit to how many entries you can have in the upoi file, that'd be the only thing that I can think of that might mess it up.

As far as the adding the correct icons, there might be an easier way to do it than the one I've used - it'd be swell if we could just drop a BMP file in and call it a day but I haven't tried that.

I've been playing around some more, the fourth field is definately for the icon. If this field is blank, the POI gets the category icon. Otherwise what is in here is the icon name, of the specific one that is selected.

 

The only thing I'm stumped with at this stage is how to go about adding custom icons to the thing. I've edited the poi_mapclose.bmp and added a few icons to it, and (I think) I figured out how the .icon files work, so I added some .icon files for my new icons, but they don't appear as choices in the nav unit.

 

Edited to add: Ok I did figure out how the poi icons work. My problem was that there's so many rendunant files, I had updated two of them but a third one was hiding... found it and replaced it with my updates and now I can import POIs directly into my nav unit, and I can create custom icons for those POIs too! So I don't need that AVIC FEEDS software at all and don't need to leave an SD card in there all the time just to use custom POIs.

 

If anyone would like information on how the icon files work, just say so and I'll post it here.

Stephanie, could you post that icon info when you get the chance? I got all the Red Light POIs to show so just need this next step.

Stephanie, could you post that icon info when you get the chance? I got all the Red Light POIs to show so just need this next step.

Here's how I did it (be warned - it's involved):

Find the file data.zip\ui_pioneer\common\poi_mapclose.bmp and edit that in a graphics editor. It is 32pixels wide and 2368 pixels tall. This is all the built in POI icons. Each icon is 32x32, there are originally a total of 74 icons.

Add your icon to the bottom, so you're increasing the height of this file by 32 pixels then pasting / adding your icon graphics there. When done, save the file. There are three copies of this file in data.zip, and to be sure, you have to replace them all with your new version. IIRC they are:

data.zip\ui_pioneer\800_480

data.zip\ui_pioneer\common

data.zip\ui_pioneer\common\night

Now that the new icon is part of the bmp file, we have to add an .icon file that refers to it. Look in data.zip\ui_pioneer\icons\poi and you'll see about a hundred icon files. This is where it's going to get tricky.

Pick one of them, it doesn't matter which. For example, "airport.icon". Duplicate this file, or copy it to the desktop. Rename the new file to "my_icon.icon" so it has a unique name. Now edit this icon in your favorite hex editor. There are lots of free hex editors out there for dos and windows and linux and mac. It has to be a hex editor, this file is not text and a text editor may mess it up.

In this file, in your hex editor, at position 0x50 and 0x52 you will see two numbers - ascii 4 and 6. These two numbers also appear at 0x7a and 0x7c. These numbers (46 if you used the airport.icon as your starting file) refer to the sprite number, in that poi_mapclose.bmp file - the numbers start at 0, so originally it went from 0 to 73, your new icon is now #74. So change the 4.6 to 7.4 in both positions in that file, then save the file. It goes back in data.zip\ui_pioneer\icons\poi

Once you've put your new data.zip back on the nav unit, when you go into the POI manager and edit your speedcam group, edit the icon and search through the options. You should see your new icon there! You may have to hunt for it, I'm not sure what order they are presented in. Maybe alphabetically based on the name of the .icon file.

Anyhow, like I said, it's involved, but it definately works.

Note - a simpler way to do it would be to just paste your new icon overtop of one of the existing ones in the poi_mapclose.bmp file, however that will change the icon of every POI that uses the one you take.

Edited to add - it only took a minute so I've just made 4 generic .icon files, "icon_74.icon" through "icon_77.icon" so if you're adding icons to that bmp file, you don't need to mess around with the hex editor. These will point to the correct icons if you add up to four new ones.

icon_files.zip