Mar 15 2010
Keir finished the Atacama Crossing “4 deserts” race — 250 km across the Chilean desert.
We tracked him using a GPS Insight TT-1900, and here is the track of his entire journey:
GPS Track of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile
Here is a picture of him crossing the finish line:
Picture of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile
He finished in 64:13:23
Congratulations Keir!
Rob.
Mar 12 2010
Keir is still hiking across the harsh Chilean desert as we speak, tracked with a 5.9 oz. satellite tracker in his pack.
Keir hiking across the Chilean desert
Not to be outdone, I covered 40 miles today in the harsh wilderness myself, with only the assistance of 20 ski lifts, gravity, 2 skis and a couple of beers:
Ski tracking in Deer Valley at Park City UT
Just kidding, obviously a lot harder to walk 20-some miles across the desert than ski around a bunch. Maybe I should invite Keir next time…
Rob.
Mar 12 2010
Keir is doing well, in 112th place (out of 127 left in the race), and there are a LOT of people who have dropped out.
112th out of 127 left in the race
The site says he has raced for just shy of 40 hours. We are tracking him every hour with a GPS Insight TT-1900.
I ran a track like this:
GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert
And see where he’s gone (roughly — we update once an hour):
GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert
This shows 94.2 miles, but it’s been more than that, since he’s not racing in a straight line.
Good luck Keir! He’s got 1 more 25 mile day, then a 50 some mile day tomorrow to complete this race, his second Racing the Planet race.
Rob.
Feb 21 2010
I took my boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.
I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend. It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).
Garmin EDGE 705
They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop. [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]
The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):
Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids
This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):
GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking
The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain]. The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).
Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):
Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ
It’s nice to have that for sports usage. But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.
And here are my cold kids. Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.
Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire
Rob.
Jan 19 2010
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.
Nov 15 2009
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.
Nov 09 2009
I decided to take my 9 year old, Jack, to Camelback mountain yesterday. I was curious how much longer it would take than the last time I went.
I brought an EZ-1000 & here is a picture of our hike, which was 1:30 up, & :56 down:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
Here is a picture of Jack at the bottom:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
Here was our location, courtesy of the iPhone (blue dot) and the EZ-1000 which had reported just a few seconds earlier:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
And 1:20 later, at the top:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
With sweaty Dad:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
And one of Jack’s shady cave — he found a few of them on the way up & down to rest in:
Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device
It took a little longer this time (last time 1 1/2 hours, this time 2 1/2 hours). But my heart didn’t feel like exploding as much as when I was in a hurry. Plus I had some company. Much better this way.
Rob.
Nov 01 2009
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.
Oct 29 2009
My brother in law Keir has covered over 30 of the total 54 miles for today as of 9:15 PST. This final 5th stage requires him to go 54 miles in 40 hours.
Here’s a picture of what we’ve tracked so far since he left Base Camp 5:
GPS Tracking Keir across the Sahara
Rob.
Oct 28 2009
We headed to Disneyland today with the boys (Sarah got her own “Princess” trip with Mommy to Disney earlier in the year):
Jack & Ryan after riding the "California Screamin'" rollercoaster
I put a couple EZ-1000’s in the boys’ pockets in case they got lost and to document our day.
Originally they were labeled Goofy & Dumbo but my boys took exception to that. I called Tech Support and within 2 minutes Adam had them changed to Chip and Mickey (per my kids’ wishes).
Here’s a picture of our first day at California Adventure, then Disneyland. (There’s a cool time lapse video of this at the end of the blog article):
GPS Tracking at Disneyland
They tracked like a charm for the entire trip from Scottsdale at 1 minute updates. No kids got lost or ran off with Goofy.
I decided it would be a good idea to walk home to the hotel. Apparently I was wrong, and had to carry Ryan on my shoulders most of the way (fun).
I got to measure it afterward — only .57 miles, but it felt like longer after walking all over Disneyland:
Walking home from Disneyland at the end of the day
Here is a video of our walking around for the day:
Rob.
