First PMTile Render

This felt great. Velogatchi was reading a PMTiles file from an SD card. PMTiles is a format for packaging map tiles into a single file, you can read more about it on the Protomaps website. I gave it a starting latitude and longitude, and it rendered the streets on that tile. Getting a map onto the screen was one of the biggest things I wanted to figure out. As bare as it looks, that’s a rendered map.

If you watch the video closely, you’ll notice four separate renders: the starting tile, followed by the surrounding tiles. That became the next challenge. I wanted to collect the shape data from all those tiles and render everything in one go.

I eventually figured that out, but in this moment, all I could think was, “I’m really doing this. And there’s the Willamette River.”