OOM 2.3 – Automatic Postbox Additions

As a fun project for OpenOrienteeringMap (OOM) during the Christmas pause, I incorporated a feature requested on the forums of NopeSport that I had actually also been thinking about myself – the automated addition of controls. I’m using Nearest Postbox which is a tool written by the polycoder Matthew Somerville to show postboxes in OpenStreetMap augment with reference numbers and other data. If you zoom into an area on the UK edition of OOM and click to add a map “sheet”, you can then click on the “Add Postboxes” button. OOM will make use of Matthew’s API to his site, to pull in known postbox locations and create controls from them. You’ll only be able to do this if there are not any controls already added. You can then edit/delete the controls (e.g. change the score) in the normal way.

Some Street-O events by SLOW and other clubs already use postboxes as useful controls. This will hopefully make it more easy for the planner, although they’ll still need to visit the postboxes concerned to verify the ref and make sure the postbox is still there…

The feature is experimental, so if you run into any bugs please tell me.