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...???

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:)

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.

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.