GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog » CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT

Mar 02 2009

Zoo trip tracking with the new EZ-1000

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Arizona,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,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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Jan 21 2009

Golf cart tracking (part 2)

Category: Arizona,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Golf,Google Earth,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 9:53 am

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.

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Jan 16 2009

Ski maps are really inaccurate (part 3 of the ski overlay series)

Category: Arizona,California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Overlays,Package Tracking,Skiing — rdonat @ 11:49 pm

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.

Comments (1)

Jan 07 2009

HUGE landmark improvements in GPS Insight (this is a big deal)

Category: Alerts,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Landmarks,New Features — rdonat @ 10:07 pm

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.

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Jan 05 2009

More GPS snowboard tracking

Category: California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Overlays,Skiing — rdonat @ 3:00 pm

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.

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Oct 18 2008

Tracking Golf Carts

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Golf,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 2:08 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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May 10 2008

Route Compliance Techniques

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,Google Earth,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Routing — rdonat @ 1:26 pm

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…?

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, Routing

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Nov 17 2007

Map books meet GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,GPS Tracking,Las Vegas,Mapping,Overlays,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:20 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Nov 03 2007

Route Reporting in GPS Insight

Category: Arizona,Company Efficiency,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Ease of use,GPS Tracking,Truck Tracking,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 1:26 pm

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.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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