Garmin c510/c530 voice hack

Here’s a hack to give your Garmin StreetPilot c510 or c530 text-to-speech capabilities, enabling it to call out street names. That way you’ll get "Turn left on Highway 128 in 500 feet" instead of just "Turn left in 500 feet."

Now when I say hack, I mean H-A-C-K! This isn’t a make your own maps kind of hack, this is one that can lead to the death of your unit. Phil Hornby, the hacker who came up with this, suffered the following while working it out:

• Several lock-ups – remove the front Fascia and press RESET to recover.
• Crash/reboot and loss of ALL user settings – Favourites, Navigation settings, Garmin Lock!!! , you name it. Nothing for it, but to reset everything manually. It even needed to relearn the initial satellite position (As in "Make sure you have a clear view of the sky")
• A very scary TOTAL lock-up that necessitated removing the four screws that hold the C510 together and then unplugging and re-plugging the battery. I suppose I could have waited for the battery to go flat!. Actually, I’ve heard of this fault affecting real C550’s …
• It didn’t happen to me during this experiment, but a related issue is the loss of the licence key file for the City Navigator NT maps.

Yikes! I’m not recommending this one to anybody.

Via GPSReview.net.