GPS Drawings

With all the less then happy things happening, I thought I'd share a link sent in by mustafap. The site is GPS Drawing, and the idea is to record your path driving around with a GPS signal, and then graph the results to draw pictures. It's fun seeing the routes superimposed on maps. Simple and fun. I hope you enjoy it too.

Comments

Family Circus

[chairmanKAGA]

Kinda reminds me of those Family Circus comics in the paper on sundays.

Kind of interesting to see where people have been...would be fun to wake up and start the GPS and then at the end of the night see where you have been all day by graphing it onto a local map. Do this for weeks. At the end of all the time, use the (x,y) cords and divide the city into 4 quadants and start to make equations of where you have been....try and see where you are most likely to be..... see what times you are most likely to be where, etc...Could be some good math to do..useless? sure, but fun if yer a geek like me:)

Gimme cell phone cells or something COOLER.

[standards]

I'd find it more interesting just to see where I have driven over the past twelve months.

Alternatively, I'd like to see what cell phone cells I drive through. That'd be neat, and perhaps more nerdly than the purpose-built paths of the site.

Anyone do that yet? I'm sure we'd all like to see that versus a distorted elephant picture made by some guy driving his car around a city.

how cool

[mojo-raisin]

I've always wondered where I am when flying over the US... never really thought about taking a laptop and GPS aboard to chart progress.

... you could even plug the data into Flight Gear in real time so you could look at your computer screen instead of looking out the window (of couse using the cool A href="satellite photo textures:)

Nothing to see here, folks...move along

[BarefootClown]

I s'pose it would be impolite to point out that this is nothing particularly new. Matter of fact, we hams have had something like this for years, but a little more fun: APRS, or Automatic Packet Reporting System. Basically, the GPS receiver is connected to a TNC (packet radio modem), and broadcasts its position at a time interval specified by the user. Now I can see where you are going. Couple the reception of the GPS data with mapping software, and you get this. Very entertaining to see where your buddy is going ("No, no, I said turn left on Brooks!"), and very useful at times--throw the rig in your trunk before you give the keys to your kid. QST did an article about this a few years ago; if I weren't so lazy, I might go look it up. Feel free to post it, anybody, if you find it.

Woud this let me track my cat's daily wanderings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are GPS receivers small enough to fit on a cat's collar?

I'd pay $ for a collar that would keep track of where my cat goes during the day when I let him out. Every day, or week, or whenever, I could download info from the collar and graph his wanderings against a map of my neighborhood.

Come on, engineers, whaddya say?

Etch-a-sketch

[toral]

It like an extremely large scale etch-a-sketch, although some of the drawings are not continuous.

Nevertheless, this is certainly nifty. I especially like the airborn ones. Someone could really exploit the 3d nature of this in the sky.

I can see this becoming another type of performance art: watch the gps path on a screen as this guy doodles something in the lake with his boat. A few people working together could come up with some especially spectacular results...

-toral

Road trip - Summer 2000

[wass]

I did just this on my road trip last summer (Summer 2K, baby!). Here's my homepage for my online journal.

I had an IBM thinkpad laptop (dual-boot Windows 95/Mandrake 6.1, although once I had linux installed I never booted up that 'other' OS :-) ), connected to my GPS (Garmin II+). I ran a VERY simple bash script that just pinged the GPS every minute and grabbed the latitude/longitude/altitude. I stored these points in a data-file, and then rendered some pretty cool maps (Mercator and Perspective Satellite Projections) when I got back from the trip. I rendered the projections on IDL, with some superimposed (and conformally mapped) satellite pictures of Earth for the terrain.

Trip started and ended in NJ, but went through about 40 states in-between, coast-to-coast. Even drove through parts of Mexico and Canada. Put about 15,000 miles on my car in 8 weeks. It was pretty cool, I was totally connected, with laptop and GPS and CB, driving from point to point. Got kind of annoying to keep doing it all the time, though (especially for parts of the trip that friends went with me), but it was definitely worth it!

The online journal isn't caught up, and is kind of wordy at times, but let me know what y'alls think. When I get some free time (yeah right) I'll add some more pictures, shorten all the blah-blah text, and maybe also add a pictures-only tour. Let me know how you guys like the maps, though. I wanted to eventually render them in Python to only use open-source software, but never got around to fully learning Python. Had to settle on IDL instead.

Re:Road trip - Summer 2000

[wass]

Thanks. Walking around with the GPS, you can definitely see a difference of a few dozen feet, especially now since the US turned off the selective availability. However, errors can be reduced to cm's or less, through time averaging (My Garmin does it, but I don't know what the max time-average duration is). So, depending on your patience and accuracy, you can make road maps that can be quite accurate.

The GPS came in real handy on my trip, though, for helping me find where I was when lost (happened all the time). The Garmin II+ has a small display that shows a trajectory like this as you go (it only keeps a finite number of points, obviously, maybe a few hours worth before it starts swapping them out). I could often match the path I was driving with the road on the map, and find out precisely where I was (of course, the latitude/longitude would tell me that too, but the maps usually have only a few lat/long bars, and interpolating between them is a pain).

Advertiser's Dream

[Big Yak]

How much time do you spend per year driving a less than optimal route (or just plain lost)? I figure I spend about 60 hours a year driving more than I need to (damn, I didn't know there was a detour there -- or, I shoulda took the bypass around that traffic jam).

Calculate:
(hrs wasted driving/year) * [(# of people who care) * (average value of hour per person)
+ (amount of wear and tear on road) + (amount of wear and tear on car) + (amount of wasted gas) + (cost of polution in air) + (money saved from less accidents)]

Using GPS systems when driving quickly add up some serious savings! Image if the Government paid 50% off all GPSes -- they'd quickly recoup their costs in terms of road/polution/life savings!

If that's not enough, would you sell your GPS coordinates and a detailed buying profile? Advertisers would be able to say -- "80% of people driving this road are interested in their MCSE certfification!", or "30% of people that go down this highway at 5 PM have children in the perfect X-Box purchasing range!", etc... Then, put some animated signs that change based on who's driving by.... we're talking serious advertising $$$!

You could use the same info for tracking speed limits & dangerous roads. I'm not talking tracking when people are speeding, but rather, track when people are speeding stupidly. Imagine if all speed limits in the world were variable, depending on the weather, the amount of accidents occuring in this area, the average age (or skill) of drivers on that road, etc. Wow. I currently live in Germany and drive 100MPH on average -- I hate going back to the states and driving 55. But, German drivers are much more skilled (5 months mandatory driver's training, no exceptions), and have on average much safer and more responsive cars...

Bottom line: Everyone should use GPS systems, and the government should be handing them out like candy. Get some intelligent privacy laws going, and It'd be an improvement for everyone!

Precision Farming

[ce25254]

Of course a business application of this sort of thing is like the project I used to work on for a major ag equipment company. GPS is put on a combine or tractor, along with other sensors, and then the location data is correlated with other data, like yield or moisture, which is collected every second. Nice maps can be drawn to give information about what's happening on a farmer's field. And it can help to make decisions about how or what to plant next year.