GPS Insight Blog » CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT

Nov 29 2009

Counting & Reconciling Tolls using GPS Insight fleet tracking

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, Driver Accountability, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, New Features, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 2:47 pm

We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).

Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):

GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”

GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option

Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).

GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report

This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.

But how many tolls is that?

You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:

How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?

We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.

This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: bay bridge, GPS Tracking, landmark report, san francisco, toll collection

Comments (1)

May 26 2009

Forgetting my car at the car wash (part 2)

Category: Alerts, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Driver Accountability, GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES, GPS Insight Employees — rdonat @ 1:26 pm

I didn’t really forget it there (yet). But since a few months ago I put an alert out there when I leave my car at the car wash for 4 hours or more, I just got this email alert along with a cell phone SMS text message alert:

I don’t want to forget, then have to find the manager at the gas station to get my keys from wherever they lock them up at night.

So I’m heading there now, thanks to my alert. Here is the article where I set this alert up last time.

Rob.

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May 16 2009

New Switch Capabilities in GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Fleet Tracking, GPSI-4000, Google Earth, Mapping, New Features, Reporting, Switches — rdonat @ 12:35 pm

GPS Insight now offer switches to its customers using the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 models of tracking device.

These are useful if you want to count and quantity where certain activity takes place, such as:

solid waste collection (tipping a can into the garbage truck)
pump activity (pumping a well, concrete, etc.)
street sweeper on vs. off activity

There are countless uses for switches, and we will go through them in future articles.

Here are some pictures of the new capability within GPS Insight for a residential solid waste operation which recently put GPS Insight on its vehicles. These are the “sideloaders” for the day (which pick up curbside cans):

We have a new “All Inputs” option for what to show in 3D Mapping — the path of each vehicle is shown in a different color, but the actual pickups are shown as green or blue dots with stars (depending on speed):

To isolate JUST the pickup activity or JUST the driving activity, put a polygon in place to show the dots like a cornrow, or turn off the time slider to show just the path:

But if all you want to do is count “tips” just run a summary report — here is the how:

Zooming in:

All in .28 seconds. Lots of information, and quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive to obtain. We have other reports available which we will go into with future articles (e.g. idling when PTO is NOT engaged, etc.).

Now when Mrs. Smith at 123 N. Main Street says you didn’t pick up her garbage on time, you’ll know what happened.

Rob.

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Apr 12 2009

EZ-1000 works in luggage in planes & trunks!

Category: Arizona, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPSI-4000, Identifying and eliminating speeding, Package Tracking — rdonat @ 11:12 am

I forgot to turn off an EZ-1000 I had brought on a trip. It was in my overhead luggage (oops).

It still tracked me on the runway (a max speed of 214 until it lost signal), then all the way home while in my trunk.

Run a quick 3D map for Friday:

We took off on time (3:35 flight pushed back at exactly 3:35 & left the runway at 3:40):

Then the unit last reported before losing cell coverage at 214 MPH after turning over the ocean:

I was out of cell range for roughly an hour, and covered 330 miles between Orange County, CA and Phoenix, AZ which means we averaged about 330 MPH:

All of our units except for this one (the EZ-1000) would store that history, but the EZ-1000 is more about where a person is right now (e.g. security guards, police officers) so it does not store data if it loses cell coverage — since we rarely lose cell coverage (except in planes at 33,000 feet…) it’s a non-issue, as you’ll see next.

After landing, it picks right up again, then tracks my vehicle all the way home, even though I had the unit in my suitcase, in my closed metal trunk:

And on the freeway, it is exactly accurate (but at 2 minute updates) relative to my GPSI-4000 at 10 second updates in the same vehicle (red line=10 second with the GPSI-4000, blue line = 2 minutes with the EZ-1000):

Here on the highway there are 2 points 4 seconds apart, with the same exact speed (67 MPH):

The points are 56 feet apart, which seems reasonable for 4 seconds at 67 MPH (technically it should be 393′ but the 1000 takes a couple seconds to transmit vs. the 4000 which is pretty much instant — but close enough– we’re not launching missiles here):

The moral of the story here is that this unit can be used to economically supplement your tracking of freight, high value packages, etc. Just Thursday a customer I visited in El Monte asked if he could use them to track shipments — Given the fact that my trunk is probably thicker metal than the typical trailer, I can say that it should work reasonably well.

Remember these units work for up to 10-15 days in “ping only” mode, and 3 1/2 days at 2 minute updates. Inexpensive external USB-connected batteries work well to extend the life up to a month or two.

This device is very reliable, and easy to use for many security, freight tracking, and occasional tracking needs. Just don’t ask us to sell it to you to track your spouse or kids — we strictly sell for B2B (Business to Business).

Here’s one more picture of the 2 minute EZ-1000 tracking (blue with green movement/speeding dots) vs. “reality” at 10 second updates (red) — it caught me speeding… I wanted to get home in a hurry obviously:

Thanks,

Rob.

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Mar 23 2009

Banana Boat Tracking with GPS Insight’s EZ-1000

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, Driver Accountability, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Identifying and eliminating speeding, Mapping, Mexico — rdonat @ 11:35 pm

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

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Mar 17 2009

Tracking the 120 mile LAPD Baker to Vegas Relay Race

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, Las Vegas, Mapping, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 8:51 pm

Los Angeles Police Department puts on a yearly race from LA area to Las Vegas. It’s 120 MILES long, through the desert, at night. 242 teams of 20 runners each participate. That’s 4,840 runners! (running 6 miles each).

It’s called the Baker to Vegas Relay.

A customer of ours, Crown Disposal sponsored one of the teams this year — the San Fernando/South Pasadena/Compton team.

Their head of IT, Jerry Prieto, asked us to loan them a GPS device and an account where they could view the progress of the race, to supplement their elaborate communications already in place to track the race.

We are happy to do so — Crown Disposal has been a GPS Insight customer for years and has given us ideas for many improvements to our product (the Speed Bands report, imported rolloff locations color-coded by age, etc).

Using an infrequently used aspect of our product “Customer Sites,” I was able to put a publicly available website out there for anyone to watch the race progress. It took about 1 minute to do this, and is seen here:

And in Satellite View we see where they ended (at the Las Vegas Hilton):

Anyway, the race commenced Saturday night, and the vehicle should have taken 120 miles to get there.

Here is a track of that vehicle, and since I really don’t know where the race physically began, I traced back from Vegas roughly 120 miles to start my “search.”

This screen shot shows I’m not too far off — the light green dots are speeding events (76 MPH max, in this case then slowing down to 6 MPH) prior to stopping at the beginning of the race:

The vehicle had driven 113.5 miles that day — we’ll subtract that from the ending mileage for the day to arrive at 120 miles in just a minute.

They leave out at 10:40:57:

From the time they got to the starting point (on Death Valley Rd., by the way, in the middle of NOWHERE…), it was just about an hour before they started their team race.

Nice terrain to have to run up! — We’re tracking the vehicle which is the lead for the team — they had several vehicles to carry all the 20 runners.

At least whoever was running at 3:21 AM got to go downhill:

They arrive at the Hilton (the finish line) at 7:55 AM — 123.4 miles and 21 hours, 15 minutes later. That’s an average of 5.65 Miles Per Hour.

The car drove a few extra miles doubling back, etc., relative to the racers’ 120 mile trek (although it might be a few more miles, I didn’t measure it myself…).

Anyway, we’re happy to help with this fantastic 25 year old event, and appreciate Crown Disposal’s invitation to help them help LAPD and the world’s “biggest police chase” as they call it.

Rob.

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Mar 03 2009

Inaugural run with EZ-1000

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Arizona, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Mapping, Miscellaneous, Reporting — rdonat @ 12:17 am

We are testing out this new tracking device which I mentioned in the past couple articles.

I am trying to lose a few pounds gained from the past 2 trade shows in Dallas (mmm, barbeque…).

So I went on a run today and put the tiny device in my right shorts pocket and headed on my usual route.

Here is the 2 minute-by-2 minute track:

As always with GPS Insight, green means moving, blue means idling (e.g. 0 mph as I start/end the run), and the color and thickness of the line goes from “light and thin” to “dark and thick” to help indicate direction of travel which helps visually determine the vehicle’s (or runner’s) activity more easily.

Here is a different perspective which shows me leaving my subdivision and heading EAST 2 miles then turning around at the main road. Note that the light blue line is much closer to the sidewalk than the line coming back (about 100 feet off). I took the same sidewalk the whole way — what happened? This is where battery life vs. 100% accuracy comes in. 100% accuracy, we are good for 10-12 hours on a charge. But we can go well over 3 days on a charge at 2 minute updates if the GPS unit is allowed to sleep between those two minutes — this generally adds some error to the location, in this case up to 100 feet when I’m not faced toward the satellites.

Well, as I mentioned, I put this tiny tracker in my right pocket and headed East. When I headed back, my body was “in the way” of the GPS signal from the predominant GPS satellites in this area at this time, in the Southern sky. This means they caught a bit of a bounced signal from the houses, trees, etc. to my right. This subtle difference shows up on the map. The accuracy of these units is very good (best case, 5 feet, worst case, 100 feet), considering the GPS satellites are 22,370 miles in space, and the tiny device is in my running shorts pocket (don’t worry, we won’t sell this one, and they are VERY waterproof, fyi…). The moral of the story is they’re highly accurate if you only need them for 10-12 hours on a charge, and pretty accurate if you want 3 days (at two minute updates). If you want less frequent updates, they’ll run up to 10-15 days on a single charge.

Our more powerful vehicle-mounted GPS tracking devices are always within 5-15 feet while driving, and typically within 10-30 feet of accuracy when parked. Either way, that is VERY good considering the standard accuracy of a single GPS fix is 9 meters in any direction. This is because only the US Military gets the “100% accurate” signals — for the rest of us it’s only guaranteed within 27′. However, the more samples you take in a given period of time, the more accurate you can become by eliminating the really far off samples. This is a topic for another day. Thankfully, our customers aren’t harvesting grain or painting road lines based on our “civilian” GPS. We don’t cost nearly as much either (trust me).

So to use Google Earth to its fullest, I outlined the path I ran and measured it to be 4.59 miles (I’m getting tired as we speak…):

[Nice mini-racecar track my neighbor has, huh? Unfortunately I don't know him...]

I can run a quick activity detail report for my rough speed while running (along with a “12 MPH” which is bad — it’s due to my going into the house & losing GPS signal which can cause a transient issue with this unit (currently, we are programming it to be less likely once we sell them).

Anyway, that’s some of what you can do with our new small, rechargable EZ-1000. (shown below):

By the way, did I mention it was 85 degrees today here in Scottsdale…? A little hot for a run already (sorry everyone back in the Northeast & Chicago)

Thanks,
Rob.

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Mar 02 2009

Zoo II — How much time at the Giraffes?

Category: Arizona, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Mapping, Miscellaneous, Overlays — rdonat @ 11:24 pm

My last article detailed how I took a very small tracking device to the zoo to track my day there. Incidentally, that tracking device has been reporting every 2 minutes for the past 36 hours (I’ll let you know when its rechargeable battery finally needs recharging later).

I want to quickly illustrate how fast it is to overlay a map of the zoo (my son brought one home & I scanned it) in order to determine how much time I spent at a particular area (my daughter loves the Giraffes so we went there first).

After importing the overlay in Google Earth, we stretch it to fit the roads, lakes, boundaries, etc. This is covered in other “Overlay” subject blog articles.

We can measure (using the Pro version of Google Earth) that the zoo is roughly 90 acres:

Dialing down the “Opacity slider” we can see through the overlay to the “real map” to determine the distance between the real Carousel and the map carousel — only 139 feet off. This map is not military grade but it works for our purposes. We can also see the Giraffe just above the carousel. They are my daughter’s 2 favorite things at the zoo, we start our trip with the Giraffes then end with the Carousel before we leave (and a toy from the gift shop to avoid a scene…).

Here we can zoom down and bring in the tracking history of our zoo visit:

It is easy to see we were walking through the zoo at 13:31, then got to the giraffes at 13:33, left at 13:41, took a wrong turn finding the entrance to the Amphibian exhibit, then got inside the Amphibian exhibit at 13:45. Well, if you use our product regularly, trust me, it’s easy to see.

You can create geofences around key areas, set up automated alarms to notify someone via email/cell SMS message whenever someone goes inside those zones, and can set up automated reports showing how much time is spent over a week at the various areas of the zoo (or your business, or the companies/subdivisions which pay you for servicing them, securing them, visiting them, etc.).

Obviously I like to use “personal” non-business related examples to illustrate what can EASILY be done using GPS Insight. I hope you can draw some analogies to how to use our product in your business in order to save money/time, reduce risk, increase efficiency, and understand and investigate/defend employee activity.

Here is a “zoomed out” version of the Zoo map overlay — you can use subdivision maps, Army Maps, Farm maps, or really any overlay useful to your business as a guide to interpreting data, quantifying activity, and identifying points of interest relative to your vehicles’ or employees’ activity.

Thanks,
Rob.

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Mar 02 2009

Zoo trip tracking with the new EZ-1000

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Arizona, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, Miscellaneous, Reporting — rdonat @ 2:10 pm

We haven’t started officially selling the GPSI-1000 yet, but I decided to test it today on a trip to the Phoenix Zoo with my family.

The GPSI-1000 is a tiny GPS tracking device which is battery operated and can be worn on a belt by security personnel, and other generally “outdoors” workers whose safety or productivity needs to be tracked by management.

It is TINY — only 1.4 inches wide by 2.5 inches long:

I wore it on my belt under my shirt all day & tracked my whereabouts every 2 minutes.

It isn’t something we recommend for tracking vehicles — our GO-3000, GPSI-4000, and LD/HD-3500 are the best for that.

But if you want to track your employees when they are OUTSIDE of the vehicle, it’s a great way to go. It will be available later in March.

At 2 minute update rates, it’s enough to know where a person has gone, and it has enough battery to last at least a day between charges.

Additionally, there is a single button which will allow us to implement either a panic alarm or a “mark my location” capability.

Here is a map of both my tracked vehicle (Navigator, the red lines) as well as the GPSI-1000 (worn while I drove, in blue):

The GPSI-4000 in my Navigator is fantastic at tracking the vehicle with fantastic accuracy. The GPSI-1000 (person tracker, really) does a good job but is only 2 minute updates, and occasionally loses track since its internal antenna is inside of the vehicle where it doesn’t get sufficient GPS signal. That’s not its job though.

When I get out of the vehicle, then it shows where we went, every 2 minutes. I won’t bore you with details of how much time we spent looking at giraffes, zebras, amphibians, etc. But I could — all we would need to do is overlay a map of the zoo, put up some geofences to match, and run a landmark report.

Instead, I can illustrate a little of that. Bear in mind that our typical GPSI-1000 “tracked individual” might be a security guard, a dock worker, a temporary worker who doesn’t need a wired GPS device in his or her car, etc.

But I can show you how accurate and useful this hardware can be, especially when combined with a vehicle tracking device:

Basically, once the driver “dismounts” the vehicle and does a patrol, some mowing of yards, movement of equipment, etc., you can still track that individual.

And if you want to know when and for how long they rode the Merry Go Round, you can use our typical GPS Insight capabilities:

Create a polygon around the satellite image of the Carousel (giving it a few more feet to make sure we catch the activity around it):

Then cut/paste into GPS Insight:

Then Paste into “Quick Import” under the Mapping: Landmarks menu:

After quickly refreshing the menu so that the new landmark shows up, run a landmark report:

.07 seconds later:

And here is the accuracy of the units while I was on the Carousel with my 3 kids and wife:

And here were the kids on the Carousel, oldest to youngest:

And on the way there with my family, I kept it under 68 (in a 65 MPH) on the trip there & back — the accuracy between both units is very good in terms of location, speed, and time — here are 2 points right next to each other & only 1 mph off [I called this unit the "Pants Patrol" since I was going to wear it on my belt, in case you were wondering...]:

These units should be available late March for $350 (with applicable $25 quantity discounts at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 levels). Monthlies will range from $15-40 depending on update frequency (on 1 per hour/on demand to 1 minute). We should have a heavy equipment version of this unit available in April as well.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Feb 04 2009

Never forget your (my) car at the car wash again!

Category: Alerts, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, GPS Insight Employees, Landmarks, Miscellaneous, New Features — rdonat @ 9:26 pm

Since we moved offices, I get my car washed more often. It’s just a block North of our office, and I’ll drop it off in the AM before work, then pick it up later.

I’ll forget though, and scramble to get there before they close up at 6 occasionally (doh!).

So the other day I left my car, got busy at work, & realized when I left to head home that I left it at the car wash.

Enough! I have 3 tracking devices in my vehicle, time to actually put them to good use (Physician, heal thyself, right?).

So, this blog article shows how to set up an alert to let me know whenever my car is parked over there for more than 4 hours.

I’ll even video it and show you how quick it is to set up this landmark and this alert within GPS Insight.

So I just created that landmark and alert, and commented about it within a video which is created below. it’s 4:36, so in less than 5 minutes I created a landmark, then a long stop inside of a landmark alert. I’ll be alerted every 20 minutes whenever I leave my car parked there for more than 4 hours.

Here is how I can create a history of my vehicle for yesterday to see that long visit to the car wash:

Here is the image in Google Earth, also showing the landmark I created (note the time spent there is 8 hours 15 minutes):

Running a landmark report shows the exact entrance and exit times (within 8 seconds of each other between all 3 devices I have installed in this vehicle):

And the report takes .07 seconds to run:

If I want to run a report for my time “at the office” that week, it will not show much time at our office itself. Then I can create a custom group called “Scottsdale Office and Car Wash Also” and run the report for that landmark group instead, assuming the time my car spent at the car wash, I spent that time at the office. This is covered in other landmark demos/walk-through’s so I will end it here.

The moral of the story is, if you have GPS Insight on your fleet of vehicles, using landmarks and alerts, you can pretty much automate anything. This will keep me from getting there late one night only to discover all the car wash people have headed home, my keys are locked inside & I’ll need to find the keys to the GPS Insightmobile and take that home instead.

Rob.

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