GPS Insight Blog » GPS Tracking

Jun 24 2010

New “Hide Vehicle Label” on Dashlet Maps

Category: Dashboard Maps, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, Vehicle Tracking, dashboard dashlets — bbarker @ 9:50 am

We now offer a new option to “hide” Vehicle Labels on all Dashlet Maps. Simply open the Dashlet edit settings by clicking on the pencil icon, find “Vehicle Labels” and then choose “None” from the drop-down menu. By utilizing this new option, you can avoid extra clutter on the map, especially when viewing a large number of vehicles.

Select "None" from the Vehicle Labels drop-down menu

Below are examples of the same mapping Dashlets with and without labels:

Following Vehicle Dashlet

Mapping Dashlet displaying large number of Vehicles

Mapping Dashlet displaying specific Vehicle Group

We also allow the vehicle icons to be clicked, which will then open up an information box. To remove the box, just click on it.

Click on Vehicle icon for information box

Vehicle information box

This new feature went from “customer request” to “in production” in just seven days! Always feel free to give us a call if you have a suggestion for a new feature by calling 866-477-4321.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: dashlet, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, Mapping, vehicle label

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Feb 18 2010

Powerful new Hierarchy capability — save a custom Hierarchy Group

Category: GPS Tracking, Hierarchy, New Features, Reports — rdonat @ 8:07 pm

We now have support for saving a custom hierarchical view — as well as using that in a scheduled report.

We still have not given access to the hierarchy to all customers, but are happy to allow you access as a beta customer if you just ask.

Here’s how it works:

When running a report, select “Custom Hierarchy Selection”:

Saving a Custom Hierarchy Selection

Then after running the report, an intermediate screen is shown where you can choose/exclude any groups from the hierarchies you have defined:

Drag and Drop hierarchy nodes to include them in the custom group

Choose another hierarchy and drag/drop nodes to “intersect” (restrict to the vehicles in the SouthWest which are Delivery, Parts, or Service), and “exclude” (in this case get rid of all Nevada and “big rig’s.”

Restricting to just the 55 vehicles you need

Then save this highly custom group as “MySavedHierarchy” by typing the group name and pressing “save.”

Saving a custom hierarchy group

Then click on “Run Report” to run the report you started & you’ll see that the Vehicle Group is a Custom Hierarchy with those 55 vehicles:

Report based on a custom hierarchy

(tip: make sure to refresh the main site to pick up the newly created hierarchy group in the main menu) Now you can use it to run any report moving forward:

Recalling a saved hierarchy group for running your GPS Tracking reports

Additionally, they now show up under scheduled report choices:

Use a Custom Hierarchy Group in your scheduled reports

Any time you make a change to your hierarchy structure or members moving forward, they will automatically be reflected in the ad-hoc or scheduled reports you run using that custom group.

This is a big deal for large organizations since they can “intersect” multiple functional/organizational/geographic groups of vehicles very easily without having to manually (tediously) create groups for every combination of interest.

Rob.

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

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Jan 19 2010

Finding my snowboarding kid on the mountain with GPS Insight

Category: Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, People Tracking, Safety, Skiing, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 11:27 pm

I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000’s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.

Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me. Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).

I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.

Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot). Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:

Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight

Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly. The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.

It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:

GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes

Here are my two boarders:

Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip

And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:

Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park

I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:

Rob.

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

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Jan 08 2010

Very cool new feature — 30 Day History in 3D Current Mapping

Category: GPS Tracking, Google Earth, New Features — rdonat @ 3:21 pm

A big customer of ours wanted their sales vehicles to be able to pull up where they have been for the past 30 days.

This is so they could “eyeball” where they have been within their territory & how recently they’ve been there, where they’ve stopped, etc.

Here is where you can go to get this new functionality now:

30 Day History Map within GPS Insight

This will show my vehicle’s location for the past 30 days, plus today. We color the vehicle’s history from yellow to green, and with thin lines representing older activity, thicker lines representing newer activity.

Then we show the full “today” line in Blue (thin-to-thick indicates the time of travel) and the link updates every minute.

We limit this functionality to a single vehicle since it is pretty computationally intensive, and since the purpose is for the driver to run it for his or her own vehicle on their laptop with an aircard.

The yellow lines are “older” activity, & the thicker green lines are more “recent” activity. The Blue lines are the current day’s activity and the red dot is the current status, along with information which shows up when it is clicked:

GPS Insight 30 day history plus current status map

If desired, the stops themselves can be displayed by “opening” the time slider on the top right:

Viewing stops within GPS Insight's 30 Day History/Current Status GPS Tracking map

This is available for all of our customers with access to 3D Mapping using Google Earth.

It’s mostly useful if you’re driving around, trying to figure out where you HAVEN’T been in the past 15-30 days — perfect for salespeople who need to cover a territory and do a lot of driving around, looking for customers.

I’m sure other uses for this capability will show up — as always, let us know if you need a slightly different version for your exact requirements.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: 30 day history map, 3D Mapping, custom request, GPS Insight, salespeople

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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)

Nov 15 2009

How much time in the NASCAR pits? (we use GPS tracking devices to find out)

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Landmarks, People Tracking, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 10:14 pm

We were lucky enough to get a couple passes for this weekend’s NASCAR event, to include pit passes to the garage & pits.

We had a couple of EZ-1000’s with us, and I want to show how easy it is to quantify how much time we actually spent in the pits (vs. the stands/box):

I first create a landmark called “PIR Pits” around the pits:

tracking activity in the NASCAR pits

Then cut & paste the PIR Pits landmark into GPS Insight:

Paste a geofence into GPS Insight

Paste here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Confirm here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Run a report here:

GPS Track of Pit activity at NASCAR using GPS Insight EZ-1000's

1.9 hours in the pits

Except that missed the part where we went really close to the “inside the building” chatter from the GPS device, so I had to carefully re-draw the polygon to get a more accurate picture of the true time spent down there.

So even though we may pick up a little bit of false “in the pit” activity since it’s so close to the box/grandstand (with drift due to the device being enclosed), this adjustment to the “pits” will give a better representation of how much time was there:

Extend the boundary of the pits geofence to get all activity

While we get a couple of random “1 minute” visits which are inaccurate due to the EZ-1000’s “inside” drift, the 2.8 hours is much more accurate than the original 1.8 — both Brent and I spent half an hour in that remote area of the pits and it makes a big difference to the total amount of time in the report by accurately creating the polygon:

2.8 hours in the pits

A fun (and loud) time was had by all:

NASCAR in Phoenix

And a favorite of mine, the RedBull 83 car:

RedBull NASCAR

I like this car so much I bought the $60 model for my bookshelf. Brian Vickers may have come in 38th today, but we drink a lot of RedBull and don’t have much use for Lowe’s in our office.

Rob.

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Nov 01 2009

The scariest Halloween costume EVER!

Category: EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Miscellaneous, People Tracking — rdonat @ 9:58 am

My kids went trick-or-treating the second we got back from Disneyland yesterday. Jack is wearing the skull face, and Ryan is the headless horseman. Sarah is the Alice in Wonderland.

Rob's scary and cute kids

(Look at the arrow on Jack’s shirt below) Just like in Halloween 3, the movie, there was something REALLY scary — truly frightening — lurking underneath Jack’s Skull costume. I had no idea until I saw it later.

YIKES! (shudder...!)

Ryan had enough battery left in his EZ-1000 to track him trick-or-treating around the neighborhood so I could stick with Sarah on her first Halloween:

Halloween GPS tracking with an EZ-1000

Rob.

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Oct 31 2009

Heading home from Disneyland, GPS tracking using “Customer Sites”

Category: California, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Mapping — rdonat @ 2:26 pm

There is a feature our customers sometimes require, where they can show a subset of their vehicles’ location to THEIR customers.

We call it “Customer Sites” and here is a good example of how it works:

I created a site called www.gpsinsight.com/disney in about 30 seconds just by configuring the “disney” group to show up publicly:

Tracking our drive back from Disneyland using GPS Insight's Customer Sites

This view only tells you current status & speed (or time stopped) but is useful, and worth mentioning here. It shows our vehicle (Navigator) as well as my 2 kids’ EZ-1000’s (Chip and Mickey).

It’s my wife’s turn to drive so I’m just catching up on email & thought I would check to see where we’re at using this site I set up so a few people could see where we were at in Disneyland over the past couple days.

Here’s a picture of Ryan with Goofy for good measure (note the GPS Insight pen for autographs!):

Goofy with Ryan at Disneyland

Rob.

Tags: customer sites in GPS Insight, disneyland, GPS Tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 26 2009

Tracking Vehicles on the Big Screen

Category: GPS Tracking, Mapping — rdonat @ 4:39 pm

A customer just sent us a picture of how they show GPS Insight on a big screen in their office & I thought I would share it:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

Here is an iPhone (e.g. no flash…) picture of the 52″ LCD in the lobby of what we track here at GPS Insight:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

I’ll put a Facebook group out there for our customers to upload pictures of their dispatch & we’ll see if people are interested in sharing this type of thing. The Grand Prize goes to one of our customers which puts dueling 120″ projection screens out there — one with 2D mapping & one with 3D Mapping. Pretty impressive. I’ll ask if they can send a picture.

Rob.

Tags: gps tracking displays, vehicle tracking displays

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Aug 07 2009

Navy Pier activity tracking with the EZ-1000 (How fast does the Seadog go?)

Category: Chicago, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, Mapping, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 3:14 pm

I took my 2 boys to Navy Pier while traveling to Chicago last week.

We went on the Seadog “Extreme” which is a fast powerboat ride on Lake Michigan. I had an EZ-1000 on me so I was able to see how fast we were going from my cell phone on the boat. Here is a Google Earth 3D Map of that activity

40 MPH is about as fast as it got according to the EZ-1000.

Here is a pic of the Seadog Extreme from my iPhone:

And my boys enjoying the fast ride:

This was Friday, so one of our developers noticed I was out on the lake & texted to see what I was doing. Then he saw I was waiting in line for the ferris wheel & he bumped my refresh rate to 15 seconds so he could see the altitude rise and fall while we were on the ride. We don’t show that data (too much information…) so I had to trust him when he said it worked. Then I asked him to drop the refresh rate to 2 seconds for the swing chairs. It got a good set of points & they all agree the speed for that ride was between 14-19 MPH:

The swings at Navy Pier:

And each of my boys again:

This is Ryan:

This is Jack:

Fun time for the kids (and Rob).

Incidentally, I was curious how long of a trip they take you on with the Seadog, and using Google Earth & the Measurement Tool, it’s simple to see that it’s about 10.5 miles after they get past the breakwater:

Thanks,

Rob.

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