GPS Insight Blog » GPS Tracking

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.

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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.

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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

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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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Jul 26 2009

Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping is here! — Assign drivers (historically) to vehicles, and report on drivers, not just vehicles

Category: Driver Assignment to Vehicles, Extreme Return on Investment, GPS Tracking, New Features, Reports — rdonat @ 4:37 pm

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

Since many customers have drivers which use different vehicles, we have added DRIVERS to GPS Insight in addition to VEHICLES. This has the following benefits:

Driver-centric reports (e.g. idling/speeding/odd-hours by driver, not by vehicle)
Administrative control of which drivers are assigned to which vehicles
Historical accountability for which vehicle was driven by which driver (e.g. for parking tickets, toll violations)

Vehicles may be assigned to drivers, and drivers may be assigned to vehicles. A driver may be assigned to multiple vehicles at one time, but a vehicle can only be assigned to one driver at a time.

In other words, if John drives car1 and truck2, and no one else ever does, he can be assigned to both. However, if Sally moves from car2 to car1, John must be unassigned from car1 before Sally can be assigned. This way, if someone drives a couple vehicles exclusively, they don’t need to be re-mapped every time they start driving a different vehicle.

Any activity performed by that vehicle during the time that driver was assigned will be associated with that driver for reporting purposes. Maps will have driver information available, and alerts/messages will have the appropriate driver’s contact information as an override to the default vehicle information (e.g. email address & cell phone number for SMS).
A driver may be assigned to a vehicle in 5 different ways:

Manual assignment via the web interface
Touching a driver keyfob to a reader in the vehicle (if installed)
Sending the driver id via Garmin
SMS text message gps 1234 assign david.smith assigns david smith to truck 1234 at that time)
API (Application Programming Interface)

Here is the workflow for assigning a new driver to a vehicle. Bear in mind that the times you can choose to assign a vehicle include now or the beginning of any vehicle trip (e.g. when that driver first started driving the vehicle). The times you can choose to unassign a driver from a vehicle include now or any begin or end of trip. These options are conveniently shown in a pick list for you to choose from, as shown in the screen shots below:

First, open the Driver Administration tool:

Click on Create New: Driver:

Then complete the form for a new driver:

Note that you can then select a vehicle to assign the driver to here, as well as create/modify a driver group (e.g. parts drivers, supervisors, etc.):

Adding a Supervisors group with 3 members:

Alternatively, you can create a driver association when looking at all vehicles under the Vehicles tab (at top):

Choose an existing driver or create a new one on the fly:

Then choose a start time for the driver-to-vehicle association (always, current date, or from a particular date/trip):

And either allow them to stay assigned or end their assignment at a particular vehicle stop time in the past:

Now that the driver is assigned (shown below), this association will be evident in relevant maps, reports, and alerts:

Driver-centric reports, mapping, and alert functionality will be added continually to the GPS Insight product to make use of this driver-to-vehicle mapping capability.
Here is an example for a day where 4 different drivers used our company car (Scion):

Trent drives to work
Elliot drives to a customer site with a salesperson (Jason)
Elliot drives to his house to pick up his vehicle
Jason drives back to work
Trent takes the Scion home

We have entered the appropriate mappings and here are some screens/reports which show these mappings:

Here is an idle report (which conveniently breaks out idling/stops/mileage/etc. by driver, by day:

The driver activity is shown (in order) on the Activity Detail report:

Historical mapping has the driver information as well:

More driver-specific functionality and capabilities will be added to GPS Insight within the next few weeks and months, and we welcome customer input and requests.

For more information on this new feature please feel free to call us at 866-477-4321, option 2 (for support).

Rob

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

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