Ski Tracking
Jun 22, 2004 02:50 PM Filed in: Miscellaneous Projects
Skiing is so much fun. Although I don't do the bumpy stuff very well (thought my 6 year old straight skis don't help) I do like to go fast. This year we went to Durango during the last week of the season and decided to take some hardware with me and see exactly how fast I was going.
The hardware in question is a Palm Tungsten T3 and a Globalsat Bluetooth GPS receiver. Since the battery life of the T3 is somewhat undesirable I purchased a Palm Power To Go from eBay, but due to a mix up on the sellers part I received DocsToGo instead. This trip was going to have to work with just the battery in the Palm. The battery life of the Globalsat has been reviewed at close to 8 hours which is plenty for a day of skiing.
The software is Cetus GPS, an excellent freeware GPS that describes itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of GPS tracking and field data collection". It doesn't do maps which is fine because I need it's logging feature, that writes the position data to the memory card.
THe rig is pretty simple, I tried to put the GPS somewhere near the top of my body (one day I wore a shirt with pockets in the sleeves that worked really well). I pared the Palm and GPS and set up the software to run. Cetus GPS will keep the Palm on and running as long as it's getting a signal from the GPS receiver. I turned down the brightens on the screen to the lowest settings to save battery life.
The only real problems I had was the GPS receiver would take some time to get a sat lock, much longer than it takes me here at home. Not sure if that's due to trees or whatever. The palm and GPS receiver sometimes lost each other, which I didn't notice till I was done with my run, with the palm securely locked up in my pocket it wasn't easy to get to. Next time around I'm going to try to find a way to mount the GPS receiver to my helmet or make use of the external antenna port. I then want a way to put the Palm on my chest so I can easily open my jacket and get to it.
To generate a map I used a website called GPS Visualizer which describes itself as "An on-line tool that creates SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) maps and profiles from GPS waypoints and tracks." I cannot tell you what an excellent tool it is. The website allows you to upload native cetus track files in pdb (palm database format), no conversion needed. It gives you more options than you would ever need to generate the maps and the author only asks for a donation! If you use it, send him a few bucks. The only problem I had was needing to install the Adobe SVG browser plugin. Once installed it worked just fine on Safari. I had tried other MacOS native programs but they all required that I converted my cletus track files and then they didn't even work with the converted files. What I would really like is to be able to play back the runs, showing a movie like interface that I could download into iMove.
Shown are several runs (not all complete) that had the most interesting looks to them. The original maps are huge so I shrunk them down and increased the scale text in the upper left hand corner. As you can see in the speed map I got up to 36MPH! Improvements to my rig should allow me to record the entire day without interruption.
The hardware in question is a Palm Tungsten T3 and a Globalsat Bluetooth GPS receiver. Since the battery life of the T3 is somewhat undesirable I purchased a Palm Power To Go from eBay, but due to a mix up on the sellers part I received DocsToGo instead. This trip was going to have to work with just the battery in the Palm. The battery life of the Globalsat has been reviewed at close to 8 hours which is plenty for a day of skiing.
The software is Cetus GPS, an excellent freeware GPS that describes itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of GPS tracking and field data collection". It doesn't do maps which is fine because I need it's logging feature, that writes the position data to the memory card.
THe rig is pretty simple, I tried to put the GPS somewhere near the top of my body (one day I wore a shirt with pockets in the sleeves that worked really well). I pared the Palm and GPS and set up the software to run. Cetus GPS will keep the Palm on and running as long as it's getting a signal from the GPS receiver. I turned down the brightens on the screen to the lowest settings to save battery life.
The only real problems I had was the GPS receiver would take some time to get a sat lock, much longer than it takes me here at home. Not sure if that's due to trees or whatever. The palm and GPS receiver sometimes lost each other, which I didn't notice till I was done with my run, with the palm securely locked up in my pocket it wasn't easy to get to. Next time around I'm going to try to find a way to mount the GPS receiver to my helmet or make use of the external antenna port. I then want a way to put the Palm on my chest so I can easily open my jacket and get to it.
To generate a map I used a website called GPS Visualizer which describes itself as "An on-line tool that creates SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) maps and profiles from GPS waypoints and tracks." I cannot tell you what an excellent tool it is. The website allows you to upload native cetus track files in pdb (palm database format), no conversion needed. It gives you more options than you would ever need to generate the maps and the author only asks for a donation! If you use it, send him a few bucks. The only problem I had was needing to install the Adobe SVG browser plugin. Once installed it worked just fine on Safari. I had tried other MacOS native programs but they all required that I converted my cletus track files and then they didn't even work with the converted files. What I would really like is to be able to play back the runs, showing a movie like interface that I could download into iMove.
Shown are several runs (not all complete) that had the most interesting looks to them. The original maps are huge so I shrunk them down and increased the scale text in the upper left hand corner. As you can see in the speed map I got up to 36MPH! Improvements to my rig should allow me to record the entire day without interruption.
Elevation Map
Speed Map
