A quick note, we’ve got a great solution for urban GPS tracking with the Sanav CT-58 among other devices. If you’re interested in GSM based tracking and rimrocked mapping, this is the place to be.
Andrew and I just spent the last couple of days at Google I/O 2008. It’s been a fantastic 2 days, energizing us both. Here are my quick reflective impressions.
On Day 1 the keynote speaker Vic Gundotra, the VP of Engineering at Google got things going with an excellent introduction into each of the session streams in a pretty seamless cohesive manner. A good launching point was the historical look at computing from mainframes to PCs to the internet, pointing to the cloud (grid) computing future of Google’s App engine and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Over the next 90 minutes he touched on Gears, Android, Web Toolkit and Open social among dozens of other themes running through the conference.
An android demo given by Steve Horowitz, the Engineering Director for Android, was one of the morning’s highlights. Showing an iPhone like application interface and nifty integration between google maps, mail and the killer demo of street view combined with the built in compass of the demo h/w (he rotated the handset showing the streetview which panned in synch with the compass) the demo put to rest our concerns about the platform’s maturity.
Touching on the session highlights for a minute: Android was pretty exciting with its fairly open architecture, multivendor support, Google Earth API, the ability to have an instance of Google Earth in your browser with a plugin was *amazing* and the MyMapsAPI was also really nice. Open Social finally was a bit of an eye opener to us. For various reasons we’ve been sitting on the fence with it and all it took was 2 days of sessions to convince us that it’s a good idea. Watch this space.
I will be going into a bit more depth into the technology and application for rimrocked over the next few weeks, but we’re going to try to keep in touch a bit more often.
This might not be news to most as it was announced a week or so ago (I’m a little behind since my vacation) but it’s worth saying nonetheless…
Recently Garmin and GE announced 2 very interesting GPS enabled devices, one is a phone, the other a digital camera.
Garmin Nuviphone
Although not expected to be released until the summer, this Garmin Nuviphone looks a lot like the Apple iPhone from the provided photos and has the potential to alter the GPS market landscape as well as the cellphone marketplace - competition in both markets is welcome in both in my opinion as good competition pushes companies to innovate and focus on the user experience - both things that benefit the consumer greatly (and in turn the companies that understand and implement these kinds of strategies).
The Nuviphone appears to be very well thought out design wise and executed well - It’s impossible to know what the real experience will be like as size/weight/battery life/price have not yet been disclosed, but for now I’m quite interested and would consider one instead of the iPhone (if either are ever released in Canada and the data rates in Canada fall inline with the rest of the developed world - I’m looking at you Rogers).
Garmin already has a very good understading of user experience on small devices and with GPS making it’s way (slowly) into digital cameras and cell phones it seems like a natural decision on Garmin’s part to me.
GE E1050
This might not be news to most as it was announced a week or so ago (I’m a little behind since my vacation) but it’s worth saying nonetheless…
With 10 megapixels, high-def movie recording, a touchscreen, GPS receiver with a MSRP of $249.99 this is a camera worth keeping an eye on! The E1050 is the first affordable camera I’ve seen with a GPS receiver on board - there’s a couple of others but the price vs. features keeps them off my list.
I don’t have any experience with GE cameras as I’m quite fond of my Canon Powershot and Rebel but at $250 I might be willing to try this out as it should be a fairly inexpensive way to have your photos automagically geocoded - and you can bet that we’ll be working on adding the ability to rimrocked to interpret the location data on the photos from this camera!
I couldn’t find any information on availability but it’s marked as 2008 camera, so keep an eye out for this digital camera - it might be the first affordable gps-enabled camera but it certainly won’t be the last, I’d expect increased competition in this market over the next year or so, which can only mean better options/experiences available to consumers - always a welcome thing!
See part 1 of my data loggers posts to see what a gps data logger is and read about the Trackstick.
After losing my Trackstick somewhere in the bush and just before embarking on a trip to California I decided I’d like another data logger as they’re quite small and make adding trip points on Rimrocked quite easy. So I started searching online to see what else out there as I wasn’t completely satisfied with the Trackstick. After reading a number of reviews online I decided on the GlobalSat DG-100 and went to canadagps.com and purchased one. At $120 it was about $30 cheaper than the Trackstick (I’ve since seen the DG-100 for as low as $80, so shop around if you’re thinking of buying one).
I’m quite fond of this little GPS logger as it’s quite easy to use - it has a single on/off button, 3 lights (one to show that a satellite signal has been acquired, one to say it’s on, and one that lets you know when the onboard memory is getting full) and a switch on the side that allows you to switch, on the fly, from one of 3. There’s also a place for an external antenna if you so desire.
The provided software, in my experience, worked fairly well, the user interface was a little clunky and not terribly intuitive (GlobalSat let me know if you’d like some help, I’d love to work on a new GUI for stuff like this!) however it did as it should. From the software you can set exactly what you want the settings of the 3 position switch to do, using a combination of time intervals and distance travelled.
After taking the DG-100 with me to California and using it while driving from San Francisco up to the coast to Bodega Bay and throughout Sonoma/Napa for a week I’m quite impressed with it and highly recommend it if you’re looking for a GPS data logger device to track your movements, record where you’ve been on a trip.
This will be part one of two, possibly three posts (depending how successful I am with the latest GPS Babel beta release and my eeePC). Part one will look at the Trackstick, the first data logger I tried, part two will look at the GlobalSat DG-100 which was the 2nd data logger i bought (the reason i needed a 2nd will become clear by the end of this post) and part three will chronicle how I got the DG-100 to work in linux on my eeePC - if it works. If I’m feeling really crazy I may even try it with Mac as I’ve found a couple of posts showing how to make it work, which means I may even get to a 4th post about my datalogger experiences.
The first question you probably have if you’re relatively new to the GPS world is probably, “What’s a GPS data logger?”. A GPS data logger is a passive GPS device and logs the position of the device at regular intervals to it’s onboard memory. After a “trip” you can plug the data logger (or memory card depending on the device) into your computer and retrieve your route, usually in multiple formats such as GPX or KML. Once you have the GPX or KML file of your trip you can many things with it, the one we’re most interested in of course is using it with Rimrocked.
On to the Trackstick…purchasing this device was easy, I simply went to their website, clicked the “add to cart” button, went through the checkout process and in 2-3 days I had my trackstick. The trackstick has a USB plug on one end and slides open to insert 2 AA batteries. There’s a single button on it that depending on how long you hold it does everything you need (in theory). It also comes with a CD that contains the software for interacting with the device on your computer (Windows only).
My first test of the trackstick was to simply place it on the dashboard of my car, hold the button until a light came on and drive to/from a wedding that my wife and I were going to that was about 45 minutes from our house. A few days later a friend of ours was going to Germany for work so I gave it to him to use, I also asked him to retrieve my tracks from the device as I was unable to get the software to work on my Dell PC or my Mac with Windows installed on it. Ian was a little frustrated with the use of the device as the single button/light setup is a bit of a pain to use and the usability is lacking because you never really know what it’s doing, although he had no trouble installing the software. His trip can be seen on rimrocked here.
Once Ian got back and I had the device again I tried installing the software a second time - no luck. About a month later Ian and I were going mountain biking and I figured it was a good opportunity to get an idea of the trails we frequent near our homes so I strapped the trackstick to my handlebars, turned it on and off we went.
We went for quite a ride, getting sort of lost but not really and about halfway through the ride I realized the trackstick was no longer on my handlebars. We doubled-back about a half kilometer or so with no luck - it was fall and the leaves had fallen quite a bit so it likely either fell into the leaves and buried itself in them or bounced off the trail under more leaves.
Overall, it the Trackstick was OK, wasn’t great as the single-button/light setup was cumbersome to use properly and of course never being able to get the software to work properly sure didn’t help. In my opinion it’s probably a little overpriced for what it is and how it works but it did it’s job well when it was working - although the software leaves a lot to be desired and is quite flaky (given my experience at least).
So, if you happen to mountain bike around the trails near Kanata Lakes/Morgan’s Grant in Kanata Ontario and you come across a little black tube it’s probably my trackstick - if it still works could you email me and I’ll setup an account on rimrocked for you to upload the points?
As far as integrating a GPS data logger with Rimrocked, it couldn’t be easier. Follow the instructions for your data logger to retrieve a KML file, log in to Rimrocked, under “Your trip > Add trip > From KML”, click the “browse” button and select the KML file that’s on your computer, press ok, fill in the rest of the trip details and presto-chango, you’ve got a trip added to Rimrocked using your KML file as the map points!