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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We started working with a well respected expert in the golf industry, Bill Yates — founder of Grey Town Golf, LLC. They are a golf management company in Pebble Beach, CA. Bill’s expertise is consulting to courses about how to improve the pace of play.

Based on his interest in a prior blog article we have begun work on a system for using GPS technology to improve the pace of play as well as maintenance and service at golf courses by tracking the various types of golf carts.

Starfire in Scottsdale was nice enough to work with us on this project, and here are 5 of their carts for yesterday:

Here is that activity as a movie:

GPS Insight movie of golf carts throughout the day

I need to remember how to embed that video into the blog, but for now it will open up in a new window.

This sample data allows us to now write alerts, reports, and maps which will allow Bill and Grey Town Golf to improve their pace of play system significantly.

Here is a “current status” dashboard view of the course and the 5 carts we’re tracking currently:

We look forward to bringing this system to market in early 2009 (and maybe I’ll get some time to test it out on the course myself…).

Rob.

This is the 3rd (and last) in a series on GPS tracking of skiers, and more to the point, the overlaying of ski maps into Google Earth in order to put that data into reference. So after asking someone way better at Photoshop than me to “stretch” that ski trail map of Heavenly Lake Tahoe and make it fit Google Earth, it has become VERY clear that those maps aren’t even close to accurate.

Photoshopping the map & stretching/skewing it to fit, then overlaying the sides to be accurate, it’s still obvious that there is no real scale built into these maps. The Gondola is nowhere near reality:

So we aborted the mission of overlaying this map in favor of simply recreating the runs as Google Earth “paths.”

Here is what it looks like once you add a number of “paths” and “placemarks” in Google Earth, using the map as a reference, and the satellite photo with the missing trees as evidence of where the ski runs actually are:

The paths are color-coded based on type (typical green/blue/black difficulty based on the map) and the Gondola is in red.

If you were using GPS Insight to say, track your Snowcats (which are used to groom the runs regularly), you would be able to run reports on which runs were groomed on which days, for how many hours, etc. This is actually something we’re starting to see some interest in from some ski resorts which is part of the motivation for this exercise (if I had thought about it in advance I could have written off the trip!).

You can see how accurate this is if you take a little time to properly map the trails — We show activity skiing right along Orion, Skyline Trail, and Ridge Run (as well as us taking the lift up ABOVE Ellies — I didn’t take my 8 year old snowboarder on this black (he probably would have done better than me, actually).

Using a combination of a ski trail map and Google Earth with recent imagery, it is easy to see which runs particular GPS data recorded activtity on.

We’re going skiing tomorrow in Pinetop AZ at “Sunrise” park (www.sunriseskipark.com) — here’s their much more straightforward trail map.

I’m done overlaying them, I think everyone gets the point now (on to more vehicle based GPS tracking topics next!)

Thanks,

Rob.

There is now a 20 minute walk-through demonstration of our new landmark capabilities here.

Thanks to 2-3 months of hard work by our developers, GPS Insight has released the next version of our landmark capabilities (not that they weren’t already better than most).

This is a REALLY big deal [kind of like Ron Burgundy, Anchorman]:

Why? We have consolidated all 6 types of landmarks into a single, all-purpose landmark — previously we had:

• Circular “typical” landmarks
• Polygon shaped landmarks
• Circular Geofences [big]
• Polygon Geofences
• Routing Landmarks
• Imported Landmarks

Now there is just one, with a much nicer 2D interface for creation:

Just enter an address (or choose the “create landmark” button from any stop on a report or detail point on a map):

Then enter an address, put it in satellite/hybrid mode, and then move the “pin” or check “Polygon” and draw an EXACT polygon geofence, then change the color, etc. You can even “lock” the landmark so other users may view, but not change it.

We even allow you to place the “pin” where you will want us to route your vehicles — e.g. the address/driveway, etc., even if you geofence the entire parking lot and/or building which you want to depict. This helps when we give you directions, etc Note the “circle” around the polygon — this helps us to speed up your reports/queries, and certain reports use the circle, and some are more accurate and use the exact polygon.

Next, you can make and assign landmarks to LANDMARK GROUPS, and assign users to them as well.

Select the users, then choose the permission options, then drag them to the new group:

Then assign landmarks to the group by individually shift or ctrl-clicking them, then drag and drop onto the appropriate landmark group:

You can choose an existing landmark group to help filter, or if you use Google Earth, you can automatically select/restrict from the list by pasting an “impromptu” polygon into the “Filter by Polygon” box:

Then only the landmarks in that list show up:

Choosing both the “Arizona” group and the “Chicago” polygon yields zero landmarks, as it should [as much as I wish my native Chicago were here in my new home Arizona's climate]:

If permissions need to be changed or removed, it can be done by clicking the “pencil” (edit) icon for that group and making the necessary changes, then saving:

So, this is a basic walk-through of the new GPS Insight landmark creation/grouping/permissioning. Since GPS Insight is very heavy in the usage of landmarks with alerts, reports, and mapping, this is a big step for us and has been a very long project to complete.

It opens up tremendous possibilities for the future of GPS Insight, and the next “step” will be to allow our customers to create and populate their own custom categories and attributes, then assign them to landmarks as well as vehicles, stops, trips, and schedules.

This will allow HIGHLY custom capabilities either on your own or with our help, to provide the following type of functionality:

• Alerts letting Supervisors know when non-parts trucks stop at vendors for more than 30 minutes, unless they are in an exception group [e.g. keeps drivers from spending too much time eating doughnuts at the vendor who brings in Krispy Kreme every day]
• Alerts letting the Manager know when drivers take their vehicles to their own home during the day, during the work schedule, vs. at night, when it is necessary
• Automated route creation based on landmarks when the branch, day, route, and priority (or AM/PM) are columns in the imported spreadsheet

Our customers may import spreadsheets of landmarks, and these custom attributes and categories will soon be supported, simply by classifying each column of your customer list (e.g. yearly revenue, type of customer, gate codes, etc.).

All these custom attributes and categories will also show up shortly on the map for dispatchers’ easy reference (e.g. is the nearest truck certified to work on a particular type of condenser, truck, etc.?).

This is a long blog article — thanks for making it this far. It’s hard to wrap up 3 months of intense work in just one article. Documentation and training will be available, as well as an online Flash video demonstration soon.

As always, thanks for your interest and ideas — most of these requirements came from customers who we listened to in 2008. Please email us or call us with questions or comments.

Thanks,

Rob.

I realized I didn’t have much data from the prior 2 days’ skiing so I put the tracking device in 20 minute mode and you can see we have more to go on now.

Here you can start to see the (thawed versions of) trails and where the points themselves lie:

Next I will begin to merge the Google Earth version of the mountain with the Heavenly Ski map:

Since the map itself is drawn on a vertical angle, I will need to reshape it, something I need to do anyway as we’ve started working on a project of this sort for a customer. This is a relatively simple thing to do, provided you know how to do it. I don’t, so I’ve got some Photoshop reading to do…

When I figure it out, I’ll finish this overlay & make it plus the data available for you to look at in Google Earth.

Rob.

We got a call today from a golf club that wants to track their carts in order to make sure the pace of play isn’t getting too slow.

Since we have several options available from a hardware standpoint, we can help with this requirement, and will probably put together (I unconsciously typed that as “putt ogether”) a golf-centric offering.

They want to be alerted when more than 2 carts are “bunched up” on a tee box, which indicates a ranger needs to go out to speed one foursome up.

Using GPS Insight, we can easily define the tee boxes, and alert/report on too many carts within a single boundary, and are happy to develop reports to help the golf industry to speed up the pace of play.

GPS Insight has a pretty golf-centric staff, so this is an interesting project we will get involved with. For a typical golf course, it will cost $350 per cart, and $32.95 per month — roughly $1.50 a day on a lease. Since the golf industry works about every day, they’ll get their money’s worth. Also, since this line of “non-diagnostic” hardware can be turned off seasonally, there will be no activation/deactivation fees for them. If this helps squeeze one more foursome in per day, that’s instant ROI, plus greater customer satisfaction from a day at the course which actually moves along at a 4 hour pace.

More on the ROI — out on Scottsdale, $175 a round isn’t uncommon. Let’s assume it’s only $50. Times 4 players, that’s $200. for 75 carts (typical), the cost is $112.50. That’s a 77.5% return on investment, PLUS they know where the carts are at all times, can analyze usage patterns, compare cart usage to actual rounds paid for (sorry all you friends of the cashier who don’t pay for your carts or rounds)… Also, we can put an alert/report in there to identify how long a cart’s run since being recharged or refueled in order to keep customers happy (no more getting stranded on the 15th with a dead cart). You can also find out who is not following the “cart path only” rules when they apply.

There are plenty of courses here in Scottsdale for us to test this new capability:

Plus, our favorite, you can use text messaging to find out how far away the beverage cart is…

Just don’t ask us to track your golf ball.

Rob.

We were asked recently to provide a solution for a large mobile advertising company which wanted to be able to:

• More effectively define, document, and sell their routes to customers
• Assure their customers of the time spent driving those routes
• Alert their staff to any infractions of vehicles leaving those routes

GPS Insight now has a “Route Path Tool” which allows you to define a route, document that route, and quantify how much time and mileage was spent on that route.

I will demonstrate on my own vehicle here by running a quick “Rob” 3D Mapping History” for the past “7d” (7 days):

Here is JUST the path (the 2 minute location dots can be easily turned on for more information) :

Using that information, I can select and create a path which is “authorized” which still leaves some activity outside the official route this vehicle should travel:

The orange path (you can choose the color) is simply me clicking the major intersections in order that I want them driven by my driver. Remember we want to drive this path frequently so that our advertising on the side of the truck is seen by as many people, and certain streets (Pinnacle Peak Road, for instance) are driven more frequently in order to backtrack and to allow more people there to see your advertisement.

We save this path into GPS Insight and can display it in many colors, with a “thin to thick” and “light to dark” indicator of direction of travel/order. Additionally, we have numbered icons to tell us which order these intersections should be driven:

I have annotated the blue-lined/numbered path with white arrows to help understand the direction of travel:

Now we can run a report on whether or not my vehicle actually stayed on this path, for how many miles, hours, etc. More importantly, we can find out very easily how much time and how many miles were spent OFF the path. The distance “off path” is configurable depending on the circumstances.

I can show the map of this and circle these two “off route” trips. One was to see my son’s “Heroes” presentation at school (where they talked and sang songs about their favorite heroes), and one was taking the kids to see Iron Man at the theater last night for Ryan’s birthday (good movie, by the way).

Zooming down we can see more information and specific times for both trips to the school (dropping off in the AM and attending the presentation in the evening):

And here were the heroes on stage. They were Christopher Columbus, Sally Ride, Teddy Roosevelt, Orville & Wilbur Wright, & others:

And my hero Ryan, who portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Heroes Presentation:

You can hardly fault me for driving off-route to go see him in this school presentation, right…?

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):

Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:

We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:

Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:

Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

• Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
• Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
• Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.

It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:

Here is the full polygon:

Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:

7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:

Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

In an earlier article I mentioned I would do a blog article about the GPS Insight route report. Here I will create a simple route (from my house to work) and run the report to see which of our vehicles ran that route. It should only be (and is) both my vehicle as well as my wife’s, since she sometimes comes by the office, or I sometimes take her car to work (I did the other day).

We construct the route by creating, then selecting a begin & end landmark, in this case “Rob House” and “GPS2″ :

Then we run a report for a range of dates, a group of vehicles, and a particular route:

Which yields this report, which shows that the only two vehicles making this trip between Rob House and GPS2 (our office) are mine (Rob) and my wife’s (Navigator). I have put red boxes around strange entries, where I either leave my car at the office for days (e.g. someone drops me off at the airport), or it takes me a long time to drive the 6.6 miles I live from work (e.g. I go to a customer meeting before heading to work), or it takes me a while to get home from work (e.g. I go out to dinner with a customer or my family).

At the very bottom I put a red box around the only time I’ve used the Navigator to go to work, this being because my wife took my car to the airport for a trip and left hers so I can take the kids to school/soccer/etc.

Perhaps I want a “median” time it takes me to get to work, and how long I usually stay at work. In this case, I would pull the data easily into Excel like this and run whichever custom calculations I need to:

Now I know it takes me 19 minutes median for me to get to work (the middle of all the samples, sometimes better than an average), and 10 minutes median to get home.

This is because I typically drop my sons off at school on my way to work, which takes around 10 minutes, but I come straight home.

This is a simple example of how you can use GPS Insight to calculate route statistics and use them to gain valuable insight into your fleet and your drivers.

Thanks for your interest, & call us at 866-GPS-4321 to talk about how we can help your company to do similar analysis with its GPS tracking project.

Rob.

Occasionally for large customers, I will print out a large overview of a day’s data, since we have a large format plotter which can print enormous (3 1/2 by 6 foot) images.

I had a few minutes the other day & decided to do this for a large Las Vegas based customer when I noticed what looked like an anomaly in their data. There was a long line connecting two position “pins” which was not “OK.” Since we report location every 2 minutes, it looked like the vehicle magically transported itself 8 miles away.

I hoped this wasn’t a problem with their vehicle’s GPS Tracking device so I looked at it, & realized it may have been towed to that facility. This customer has lots of large delivery vehicles and there’s no reason they couldn’t have used one to “deliver” another without the vehicle being turned on (maybe to save gas, or they didn’t have a driver to take it over there).

Here is the image with the anomaly:

Zooming down, it is simple to identify which vehicle this was — LVD-15405-18, with a 59 minute ’stop’ (tow) beginning at 4:12 PM.

Now here is the hard part — there are tens of thousands of points — we need to filter out ONLY the vehicle which may have been towed, and the vehicles which could have potentially towed it, as well as just the data points from the time it was towed. Otherwise there is simply too much data to be able to see what happened here and get to the bottom of things. Thankfully that’s what GPS Insight allows our customers to do very easily, using something called the “time slider” and by using the inherent strengths of Google Earth.

We go to the opposite side of the long by clicking the next point in that vehicle’s history, an idle stop (blue) at 5:11 PM, where the vehicle “appeared” spontaneously, and see there was only one other truck there that day — that makes it easy to view ONLY those two trucks at once. One (our towed one with the long line) has a orangish-red line, and the other vehicle ahs a green line and is truck LVD-40209-RIG:

Because we know the 2 trucks, we can easily look at ONLY their history and because we know the vehicle was towed between 16:12 and 17:11 (4:12 PM and 5:11 PM) we can use the “time slider” to show ONLY the location “points” during that time & a little bit before & after. It shows exactly what I thought — the vehicle “towing” the other vehicle leaves that location shortly after it stops at 4:12, and arrives just a couple minutes before it starts again at its new location at 5:11 PM.

I have put big red arrows to show the direction it traveled to get there, and have highlighed the fact that it was just pulling in at 5:05 PM, 6 minutes before the vehicle was started up again, probably to back it off of the large delivery vehicle it was parked upon:

Another way to quantify this would be to create a “TowStart” and “TowStop” landmark at each of the two ends of the line and then run a route report for them for that day to see which vehicles went from one to the other — this is done by clicking on “Landmark: Create from point” which brings up this screen to easily place/adjust your landmarks.

Routes are a good topic for another blog article, so I’ll just show you how easy it is to create a route in our system, and the next article I will cover this topic in greater detail:

In a nutshell, with no knowledge of this customer’s business activity today, I was able to gain insight into an event which occurred to one of their trucks. It was towed by another one of their trucks, and evidence of this fact took only a couple minutes to get out of tens of thousands of data points, using GPS Insight. That’s what we do — give our customers (and sometimes ourselves) insight into what their fleets are doing at all times.

Thanks,
Rob.

We have recently begun to work with the ADOT (Arizona Department of Transportation), and were asked to incorporate mile marker data into GPS Insight for them. Of course they have this information somewhere, but in the time that it will take to get the raw data and process it into GPS Insight, we could simply create these mile markers “manually” and I thought this exercise is worth documenting on the blog.

First, I found a high resolution map of the mile markers online via Google.

Then I took a close-up screenshot of the map for the I-10 [I just traveled this last week myself so I thought we could do some interesting analysis of this data later].

Now I can import this “overlay” into Google Earth and use it as a template for creating the mile markers:

Note that the important thing here is that the part you really want to “trace” is accurately stretched over the map — maps and Google Earth inevitably diverge, since maps are never as accurate (or spherical) as Earth. The other roads/borders will not match exactly unless you change the “keystone” using a graphics editor. It would be nice if Google would add keystone as an editable aspect of overlays in the future (keystone is effectively stretching an image more on one side than on the other).

Now that we have this image, we can create landmarks on top of each “10″ mile marker (the map only shows the “tens”).

Since this particular mile marker is on the edge of what I considered “accurate” (due to keystone) I measured it myself using the Google Earth Path ruler to 10 miles from the border.

Then a quick copy/paste/rename/replace of the original allows me to quickly place the next 14 “tens” mile markers, placing them on the red dots but on the road itself from Google, which is always far more accurate:

In order to move a copied/pasted landmark, make sure the original is “turned off” (otherwise you can’t “grab” the one you want to rename/remove) and then right-click it, choose properties, and then you can move it when your cursor turns to a pointing finger. Remember to change the name (from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, etc.).

Here is the final product (note I created a folder in “my places” and placed the numerically sequential points along with the overlay map):

Then for an additional I-10 definition I will draw a rough polygon landmark around the I-10 which will help me to answer questions like “how much time do my vehicles spend on the I-10 between mile marker 0 (border) and 150 (Phoenix)?”

The key to accurately defining borders around large areas is to use the “compass” area to navigate between clicking between areas. Plus you can right-click to remove your last “incorrect” points and zoom in/out, move, and pan/tilt using the mouse at the top right, since your mouse otherwise is being used to define the polygon.

Now we can easily find a particular mile marker by typing “ctrl-f” for find, then “I-10 40″ to instantly find/double-click that point for instant navigation:

And last (most importantly), you can instantly answer questions about your fleet like “How long did Rob (in the Navigator) take driving to, then back from DisneyLand last week on the I-10 in Arizona between mile markers 0 and 150?”

We see it took me 1:50 to get TO Disneyland on the I-10 and 1:41 to get back during that same stretch of road, and that it took roughly 3 days and 7 hours from the time I left Arizona to the time I returned (since it is on the border at Mile “zero”), by running this report (which takes a split second to complete):

And here is the actul trip itself along with a 6 minute stop (we were traveling with our kids…):

You can see we made it a whopping 83.2 miles before hitting the first of what was many rest stops on our way to DisneyLand…

And that stop was apparently at mile marker 87, 3 miles before 90, between the 80 & 90 we just created:

Thanks for reading through this practical example of how to use GPS Insight and external mapping resources (ADOT mile marker maps, Google Earth, etc.), along with real GPS data to answer questions you may have about your fleet. Of course ADOT would want to answer other questions (response times to accidents in certain areas of the state, proportion of their vehicles in any one particular concentration) but having these landmarks and polygons in the GPS Insight system helps them (and all of our customers) to answer these types of questions.

Here’s the Google Earth file for you to see the results (minus my DisneyLand trip):

http://www.gpsinsight.com/tmp/ADOT Mile Markers.kmz

Rob.

Here at GPS Insight, we are continually working with new and existing customers to help meet their requirements. That includes the US Army (of which I was a member years ago — I was an Artillery officer for some time, so these requirements came easy to me to define and implement with the help of our team here).

We were asked to provide GPS Tracking devices for training purposes, since the Army has a hard time getting (and paying for) the expensive military grade GPS Tracking devices in a training environment.

That means our troops don’t train the same as when they get into battle, and otherwise they need to learn how to use GPS tracking “on the job” which defeats the purpose of training!

So we have been working with the Army on a training program to provide low-cost, high functionality GPS tracking to troops BEFORE they get to the urban battlefield.

GPS Insight leverages several high tech mapping capabilities including Google Earth and cell-phone mapping which make it similar to what our troops use in the desert, and we have enhanced our offering for the Army.

We now allow customers to use GPS Insight as a repository of map “overlays” which could be anything from a subdivision plan to a high-resolution aerial photo to, in the Army’s case, a training map with grid-lines as are typical in the military (a grid line is a 1 x 1 kilometer numbered square and an “eight digit” grid equates to a position on the map within 10 meters).

We put a “reference map” capability together for the Army which allows them to enter 6, 8, 10 digit grid coordinates and exactly pinpoint the location using Google Earth. Additionally, we have given them a repository of map overlays to bring into Google Earth as well.

Here are some screenshots:

Enter an 8 digit grid to the side of a lake where there may be some training being conducted:

This yields the following:

Then pulling the military map from the overlay repository:

We see the location on top of an Army map:

Then finally changing the opacity of the overlay to see both “reality” and the map really brings the two together intuitively:

We look forward to helping the Army with training our soldiers — the GPS tracking technology they use in battle helps to locate our troops, identify hostile areas, tag potential IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices), and better their understanding of the battlefield.

GPS Insight and I are proud to be helping with this training mission and wish our troops the best.

Rob Donat

SoBe Beverages just launched their Love Bus tour across the country and uses GPS Insight to track their vehicles and let their website users know their location in real time via www.sobebev.com/lovebus.

In addition to tracking the Love Bus tour (6 buses across the country distributing delicious SoBe beverages to fans at various locations), GPS Insight tracks the Lizard King, a 160 Mercury 4 Door Woody Station Wagon with 700 horsepower which was built on the Discovery Channel’s American Hotrod show over several episodes.

It’s pictured here:

The Love Busses or the Lizard King may be coming to a town near you — check it out on SoBe’s website and get some good stuff to drink and some SWAG to take home with you!

Thanks to SoBe for being one of our cool GPS Insight customers and for using the product in an exciting way that helps their customers find these promotional vehicles in real time.

Here’s a screenshot of the GPS tracking map they use from GPS Insight but host on their website with only a small amount of code — we let any of our customers use this technology to let their customers, partners, and employees see the current status of any/all of their vehicles in real time without logging in (or they can choose to password protect this information):

Find one near you!
Rob.