Skip to content

About

The Author

Fabien ALLAMANCHE (@allfab) — Geomatician at Vienne Condrieu Agglomération.

Computing and new technologies have always been my passions.

Background

Holder of a DUT in Civil Engineering from IUT A in Lyon (2004), Fabien is self-taught in the field of geomatics. He has over 20 years of professional experience in this sector.

Areas of Expertise

  • General Geomatician — Full geographic data management: acquisition, analysis, representation
  • GIS Developer — Specialized geomatics development and system administration
  • Thematic Geomatician — Territorial analysis of projects

He also provides project management consulting, technical assistance, and technology watch in research and development.

  • GitHub — GitHub profile
  • Blog — Personal blog

The Project

GARMIN IMG FORGE is a personal project born from the desire to create Garmin topographic maps using exclusively free software and open data.

The project follows an end-to-end FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) approach: open data (IGN BD TOPO, Etalab 2.0 license) transformed by open-source tools (ogr-polishmap, mpforge, imgforge) into ready-to-use maps for Garmin GPS devices.

Inspirations

This work builds on foundations laid by the Garmin cartographic community, notably:

  • Articles from GPSFileDepot (2008, updated 2016) on creating custom Garmin maps
  • The mkgmap project — open-source Java compiler that demonstrated it was possible to produce IMG files without proprietary tools
  • The cGPSmapper documentation — which defined the Polish Map format as the intermediate standard

Licenses

The project adopts a hybrid licensing model, adapted to the nature of each component:

Component License Reason
ogr-polishmap MIT GDAL driver — compatibility with the GDAL ecosystem (MIT/X), facilitates potential upstream integration
mpforge GPL v3 Standalone tool — copyleft, derivatives must remain open-source
imgforge GPL v3 Garmin IMG compiler — aligned with mkgmap (GPL v2), derivatives must remain open
Documentation / site CC BY-SA 4.0 Standard for documentation, with mandatory attribution
Produced maps Etalab 2.0 Inherited from IGN data (BD TOPO)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome:

Former site

The former project site remains available at allfab.github.io/garmin-ign-bdtopo-map.

Comments

Comments are managed by Comentario, self-hosted at comentario.allfabox.fr. Posting a comment may set a session cookie.

Fund a summit