GPS Insight Blog » EZ-1000

Mar 09 2010

Not all ski slope GPS Tracking devices are made equal

Category: EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Skiing — rdonat @ 1:54 pm

I’m on a vacation at Park City Utah, and I have a new app for my iPhone called Navionics. It lets you see where all the ski trails are, and search for them, as well as track your own trail.

It’s got great features, but is a shining example of how inaccurate phones are for tracking purposes. The “pins” are GPS Insight, and the little yellow “O”s are my Garmin Edge 705. The red line which goes off the mountain then back at the top of the lift is the iPhone based tracking device. I did not go over the side of the mountain, trust me…

GPS Insight vs. Cell Phone Tracking

It’s a nice app nonetheless – here are a few screen shots:

Ski trails on Navionics

List of trails you can choose to see in NAVIONICS

Highlighting a single trail in NAVIONICS

But when you take the inaccurate iPhone “track” which NAVIONICS provides out of the map, you can see that GPS Insight (light blue) and the Garmin 705 (red) are both very accurate. The GPS Insight EZ-1000 was set for 1 minute updates, and the Garmin is about 10 seconds between points. The big difference is the EZ-1000 transmits its location every minute, and with the Garmin (meant for bike riding), you need to upload the data when you get back to a PC.

GPS Insight vs. Garmin to track snowboarding

The speeds even match up pretty closely:

snowboard speed using GPS

Note that this view (from the Garmin website) shows both speed AND elevation (so you can see I went on the long run 4 times, & smaller runs 5 times through the day):

GPS Tracking snowboard activity & speed

That was enough to kill my newbie snowboarder legs, so I’m taking today off & have plenty of time to write about it…

Rob.

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

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Feb 21 2010

Better GPS Tracking than EZ-1000’s for Skiing

Category: Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Navigation, Garmin Integration, Google Earth, People Tracking, Skiing — rdonat @ 10:14 pm

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.

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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Dec 26 2009

GPS Insight tracks a Princess on Christmas

Category: Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, cell phone capabilities, mobile mapping — rdonat @ 10:34 pm

My 4 year old daughter Sarah got a Disney Princess jeep from Santa Claus on Christmas (along with a liberally applied Tinkerbell makeup kit, earrings and much much more…).

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

Never missing a chance to track something important, I covertly put “Rob 1000,” a GPS Insight EZ-1000 in the battery compartment:

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

So off, we go. When we get to the corner, I check the location on my iPhone & it shows we’re there:

(I’ve blurred the street names):

Tracking Princess Sarah

Here’s a picture of her at that intersection:

Tracking Princess Sarah on Christmas

A quick 3D history report:

GPS Insight 3D History GPS Tracking map

… and here’s our 20 minute walk around the neighborhood. Per usual, our 3D mapping starts “light & thin” and gets “darker & thicker” so you can see the direction of travel is clockwise around the neighborhood easily, just by looking at it (or by the times which are at 1 minute intervals): [by the way, blue = idling, e.g. zero MPH, & green = moving]

Princess Procession on Christmas Day

She wants a faster car though already…

Princess Sarah wants a faster ride

If there’s one person I’ll break the “we don’t track kids” rule at GPS Insight for, it’ll be Sarah when she’s ready to drive (especially at the rate she’s applying her Tinkerbell makeup).

Ok, here’s one more bonus picture of my Princess:

Sarah on Christmas

Rob.

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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 09 2009

Jack’s first Camelback climb, GPS Tracking to document it

Category: Arizona, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, People Tracking, Running — rdonat @ 10:00 am

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: