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How to: Use a GPS watch, XML and Satellite photos
ptorrone writes "Engadget.com has a How-to article about using a Garmin Forerunner 201 watch and XML to export a runner's tracks and place them over Hi-Res Satellite photos. The author plans to run 10 miles, in 10 cities over the next 10 weeks and print out all the images."
...to ruin a good run. I find running to be a perfect time to check my type-A personality and my obsession for order and understanding at the door and get good and meditative. You can embrace your inner geek the other 23 hours of the day.
If the guy running is like the average geek, he's going to stop every 100 feet and get his heart started again. 10 miles? He'll need to be rebooted more often than Windows 95 with a bad video driver!
I can see a lot of benefit of using this on motorcycle trips. I often go riding with no destination in mind, taking randon turns, getting lost, then finding a familar main road and working way back again. I often wish I could retrace my route on a map later to find out exactly where I went.
True that. I bring a GPS, LandSat Compass, and Map with me when I go out into the wilderness. I rarely use the GPS. I maily only use it to compare my estimated position to my actual position. I can usuall y find my position pretty accurately using landmarks and their relative bearings to my position. And when I do it, I understand where I am on the map even better than when using a GPS.
Admittedly though, if you remember to set a waypoint for where you started, you can get back quite quickly by just running in a general direction, and checking how I am doing every 2 minutes or so.
What I really need is to be able to GPS my cat (who typically is a couple of feet away hiding under a bush contemplating whether or not to respond to my calls).
Because this device allows you to time your splits to make sure you're running at your target pace without "pre-measuring" your course. Granted, to some people this isn't important, they're just running of the joy of it. Others--while also running for the joy of it--are running to train for upcoming races, and making sure you're on pace become very important. However at the same time it's fun to run different routes so you don't get bored with the course. This let's you run any course (provided you can get Sat signal) and stay on pace.
Plus you can do all those other geeky things in the 23 other hours, like automatically download the XML tracks, and plot it on sattelite imagery.
This technique of overlaying GPS trails on maps are the basis of most moving map programs, e.g. Oziexplorer
I recommend Geocahing.com for more fun and games, as well as other games : GPSGames
My little yellow Garmin, my Palm m130 and I keep ourselves quite happy thanks... GPS has quite a following in NZ - GPS.org.nz
If you (and your mods) had RTFA, you would see that this is an extension to the original. It's even in the first paragraph on the page, "I've received a lot of emails about a project on my running for geeks web site, so I thought I'd show how I make high resolution maps of the places you jog, with the tracks overlaid on top." More appropriate for a slashback? Sure, but not a dupe (for once).
Most GPS units will stream their data to a standard format that can be captured with Hyperterminal or something similar. Writing a Python script that parses the data and converts the coordinates to Lat/Long decimal degrees is very easy. I wrote one for our Lowrance GPS/Depth Sounder to plot course, position, and depth data for our many small lakes. With a few control points to find the current water elevation before sounding the lake, a failry accurate digital terrain model can be generated using some good GIS software. I'm sure techiniques like this could be used in many situations; the XML output is a neat idea and something I'd like to look into. Since Python has great string manipulation capabilities however, its nice to use for the amount of customizing that can be done (the data string can carry rediculous amounts of information like depths (mentioned above), ground speed and lots of other stuff, depending on the type of GPS unit).
According to this I ran over my neighbours houses and over water. I'm good.
... the Degree Confluence Project.