TomTom TTBIN to GPX Converter

TomTom GPS watches

NO LONGER SUPPORTED SINCE THE FUNCTIONALITY IS ALSO PRESENT IN MY OTHER APPLICATION: TOMTOMWATCH

I recently bought a TomTom Adventurer. Obsesessed with accuracy as I am I was happy to find that is as accurate as my I-GotU watch, and maybe even better (see my comparison).

tomtom

However, I am not really happy with maintaining my activities in the TomTom cloud. For this, I have my own homepage for that. Looking at the TomTom generated GPX files, I miss some information like speed and heading. Furthermore, the TomTom generated GPX files seem to be smoothed with respect to the raw ttbin data. Therefore I wrote my own ttbin to gpx converter.

.ttbin file format

Unfortunately TomTom does not disclose the .ttbin file format. The .ttbin files are used on GPS watches for storing the raw GPS logged data. Thanx to projects like FluffyKaon and ttwatch we have some insight in the format. However, a number of records that my TomTom Adventurer producers is undocumented.

Basically the .ttbin format contains a number of records. Each record starts with a record tag byte identifying the record type. The first record in the file is the header. A.o. it contains a definition of all supported record types with their length.

 

GPX converter

I wrote a Java program that converts the .ttbin to .gpx. The reason is that I want to disclose more information in the GPX than TomTom does. Download it here.

One of the missing features of the Adventurer is the logging of waypoints during the track. Therefore, I implemented a nifty feature in the converter: When you pause your track and immediately (= within 5 seconds) resume your track, the converter treats it as the logging of a waypoint (<wpt> entry in the GPX). If the pausing takes longer, it is treated as a real pause, resulting in the beginning of a new track segment (<trkseg> section in the GPX).

Note that the TomTom generated GPX files contain a somewhat smoothed version of the track. The smoothing is higher for ‘hiking’ activities. TomTomConv contains the raw, unsmoothed GPS coordinates as present in the .ttbin file.

tomtomconv

 

Be sure to modify the tomtomconv.properties file before use! The file is self explanatory (I hope).

Disclaimer

I wrote this application for my TomTom Adventurer. It probably won’t work for other types, since they don’t have a barometric sensor. I wrote it for own use, with personal requirements. It won’t support non-GPS activities like swimming.