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...???

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.

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:)

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

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.

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.

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: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!

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.