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

Taxi drivers?

[Quasar1999]

Can we use this against taxi drivers, the next morning when we sober up and realize that fastest route from the bar to our house was not the 45 mile route the driver took...???

Re:Taxi drivers?

[MxTxL]

It's especially incriminating when you show everyone that the path he took draws out an extended middle finger.

Re:Taxi drivers?

[Tackhead]

> It's especially incriminating when you show everyone that the path he took draws out an extended middle finger.

Never mind a taxi driver. I have visions of pilots doing this right now over a certain part of the world ;-)

So how long...

[mmontour]

So how long until one of the slashdot trolls starts posting a GPS drawing of that goatse guy?

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.

Re:Gimme cell phone cells or something COOLER.

[Gordonjcp]

Cellnet phones already do this. You can set them to show you the "local" STD code for the area you're driving through.

I don't know if any mobile phone networks in the US do this yet, it probably need to use digital mobile phones to work. As far as I know the old ETACS phones didn't do it but GSM ones do.

Re:Gimme cell phone cells or something COOLER.

[hey!]

88I'd find it more interesting just to see where I have driven over the past twelve months.

Just get a GPS with a 12VDC adapter and leave it running in your car. Periodically download your track log to your PC -- voila!

Your GPS manufacturer probably has software to do this. I have a Garmin; there are shareware utilities for managing the tracklog and waypoint database. Alternatively, there are open perl modules that talk the Garmin protocol -- very nice for owners of the cheap etrex.

(Personally, I think the etrex antenna sucks but it is otherwise a sweet little box that works fine in the car where you don't have to worry much about tree cover.)

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.

The really alpha-geek thing to do would be to hack your cell phone to tell you. Otherwise, you could approximate this by plotting the centroids of the cell as waypoints and downloading them to your GPS.

An even nicer thing would be to do a PDA application that talks to your GPS so you could have a more sophisticated database. I've toyed with several for the palm: the Magellan unit for Vx form factor and the Rand-Macnally unit for the III form factor (These are somewhat obsoleted by the new form factors). Both of these work by sending standard NMEA strings with position, heading and speed information over RS232, so acquirign fix information and parsing it is a snap. The Magellan unit is excellent; it locks on fast and comes with first class software that turns your palm pilot into a handly little GPS with a full GUI.

The Rand Macnally unit is pretty much junk: the mapping software that comes with it is very crashy on the palm. However the desktop software is fine and very useful for street mapping and the hardware unit is acceptable: it takes a long time to lock on, but it performs acceptably thereafter if you have good coverage. The big advantage is that if you look in the store specials bin it can be got really, really cheap: the III form factor is gone and because of the crappy software the Streetfinder/GPS for palm package has a very high return rate. This makes it good for experimenting if you have a III* palm, or can get your hands on one. The most important strings for position, heading, signal quality etc. are standard across all manufacturers.

There are some clip on units for WinCE too; I expect the also work by sending serial signals. In any case, your other choice is to make a null-modemish cable for your GPS to connect it to your PDA or laptop. The connectors on GPS's are non-standard (they have to be water proof) and very expensive: a cable with the GPS connector on one end and bare wires on the other cost about $40. There was a guy who had molded some connectors for a couple of Garmin units and was selling them for a reasonable price over the internet -- try a google search.

There used to be a Rand-Macnally package with the streetfinder package and a small, puck like GPS unit with a DB9 DCE wired connector that plugged straight into your laptop to transfer data and to get power. This cost me under $100, for which I got the GPS (sans any hardware user interface which was fine for my purposes) and street maps of the entire US (albeit windows only). This might make a good experimenter's unit if it's still available. If you want to use it with a PDA, simply make a little straight through dongle that separates power leads and runs them to a small battery pack.

By the way, interfacing with GPSs and other NMEA capable equipment is one fault I found with the Linux PDA discussed a few days ago. Sure, USB is better for desktop integration, but you have to get a CF format serial card (such as the Socket corp I/O card) to interface with this kind of equipment. Hopefully, there are drivers for serial cards, otherwise they're useless for many kinds of apps you'd particularly want an open software based platform for.

You know...

[dwdyer]

Maybe I've read too many marginal novels, but I imagine using this as a way to communicate covertly. Granted, it'd be a royal pain in the ass.

Drive or walk your message, while transmitting your location. Glyphs could stand for entire blocks of meaning. Encrypt the message into glyphs, then walk them while transmitting encrypted GPS data. The data would then be smoothed (in space and time domains? What about traffic jams?) in order to recover the glyphs. Encrypted sign language in the large.

But most of all, it reminds me of the alphabet-walking man in Paul Auster's City of Glass.

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:)

Re:how cool

[astrophysics]

The velocity limitation imposed on comercial gps's is that they max out at 999mph. Since that's nearly mach 2, not a problem for comercial flights. I download waypoints for several cities in the regions where I'm flying so I can see right on my GPS's screen, without having to bring a laptop.

E

Re:how cool

[Gordonjcp]

Musty have been something wrong with your GPS's, I've never had that happen. But then again I've never used them on a commercial aircraft. I've been above 11,000ft a few times though, and never saw the GPS crap out.

Are you sure it's GPS? Quite sure you're not just hallucinating a GPS failure due to anoxia? ;-)

And don't forget crop circles

[ShaunC]

Attention, mysterious crop-circle makers: next time you liquor up and head out to Billy Bob's farm for a fun night of, uh, cornstalking, don't forget your GPS! Would be interesting to see the GPS track left behind from a crop-circle creation.

One thing that kind of irked me about the site, "data alteration" is used in part to make most of the images. I think I'd rather see the raw unaltered images. What's the point of doing the whole GPS position tracking thing if you're just going to alter the data to make it look "right?" Seems equivalent to sketching a landscape, only to take a photo afterwards and toss the sketch into the trash.

Shaun

GPS-guided missiles

[macdaddy]

I think it would be really cool to do this with the GPD-guided missiles that we're using against the Taliban (note I said Taliban and *not* Muslims). I would love to see their path from whatever launched them, avoiding enemy SAMs, hills/mountians, until the reached their target. That would be pretty neat I think.

Re:GPS-guided missiles

[Goonie]

Fascinating. I'm sure military intelligence agencies the world over would love this kind of data . . . .

Seriously, sure it'd be really cool to look at (particularly if they combined it with some cool 3D imaging so we could have a "virtual missile cam"), but the chances of this kind of data being released before 2030 or so are somewhere are pretty minimal.

Re:GPS-guided missiles

[kruczkowski]

This guy I knew told me a story that a few years ago they declassified the videos from the bombs that fell in '91. He said that all you saw was desert, then a small building, then 2 guys standing outside smoking... and blank. Wonder what they were talking about.

Dangerous Information

[Myriad]

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...

Let me get this straight... you want to hand your girl-friend 3D graphical evidence that you weren't working late, that you've actually been drinking with your buddies at the bar again?

All I can say is: Bad, bad plan.

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.

Re:Nothing to see here, folks...move along

[hey!]

Wasn't the original goal of APRS to see who was around to talk to?

If so, it shows another reason to do things just because they're interesting: they often take on a life of their own. Like some finnish CS student writing his own OS kernel.

APRS was almost cool enough to get me back into ham radio.

Re: Nothing to see here, folks...move along

[InitZero]

And, of course, that GPS/APRS information is gated to the Internet at the site FindU.com. For example, I'm right here. (Actually, I was there a while ago.)

Position information can be updated as often (every ten seconds) or as rarely as you want (when active, I send a packet every two minutes when moving; 30 minutes when stopped). You can also stations near me.

I never found ham radio very interesting until the advent of APRS. I can talk with someone across the world using email or a telephone. APRS brings something to ham radio I really enjoy.

When I'm touring on my bicycle, I generally have the GPS and ham radio with me. Folks all over the work can track me on the internet. One of these days, I'm going to tap into my heart rate monitor so that data can also be uploaded to the internet using ham radio.

Ham radio is a great way to your geekness to the next level.

InitZero

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?

New contest!

[phraktyl]

Kudos to the first person to drive around their country to spell First Post with their GPS system.

Other allowed GPS path contest entries would include: Beowulf, Natelie Portman and JohnKatz Sucks.

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

Wait a Minute

[nihilogos]

I thought my girlfriend said she was going to the movies. There's no cinema there.

Re:Pointless?

[toral]

I'll bite:

More pointless than covering a hotel room with melted cheese, or submersing a Jesus figurine in a jar of urine? I see this as art; a creative form of expression. In that respect it isn't any less pointless than your favorite architect, painter, or sculptor.

Sure, this fits into a niche. Many people can't or don't understand gps, tracking software, or data interpreters. Nevertheless, the end result is the same: people translating an idea onto a medium. Painters use canvas, musicians use tape, these people are using pure space. If you think about it for a second, it doesn't seem pointless at all (to me at least), but rather nifty.

This may not be your thing. I don't care much for landscape painting. But that doesn't mean it is lacking a point. If nothing more, it sounds like the people doing this are enjoying it. Judging from the comments, it looks like they aren't alone. In fact, getting a reaction from someone who doesn't like it even validates it's point...

-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).

Re:Pointless?

[B.D.Mills]

I guess someone has a lot of time on their hands. Or maybe someone wants to recapture the experience of Etch-a-sketch with a GPS receiver and a real-time graphical display. Maybe they're perfecting the art of giving future GPS-based incarnations of Big Brother "the finger".

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!

Re:Other program

[brucehoult]

In fact we glider pilots have been doing this for nearly a decade now. The world championships in New Zealand in 1995 were judged using GPS flight records (I was one of the scorers), as has every world champtionship since -- and most local and national contests too.

Here are the results of that contest. In the daily score sheets each flight is linked to the GPS log of that flight, so anyone can analyse the flying style and tactics of world champion pilots. You need a free program to view these files.

Here are some examples of good glider flights made in the USA, such as a 500 km flight at an average speed of 247 km/h (153 mph). Without an engine!

Re:Woud this let me track my cat's daily wandering

[jonr]

Well, the Garmin eTrex are pretty small, and I recall a Seiko or something GPS watch...

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.