GPS Insight Blog

Mar 12 2010

Keir is still racing across the desert in Chile, tracked by GPS Insight

Category: Chile, Google Earth, People Tracking, Skiing, TT-1900 — rdonat @ 7:07 pm

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.

Tags: Chile, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, Race the Planet, Skiing, TT-1900

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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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Jan 16 2009

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

Category: Arizona, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, 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.

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Jan 05 2009

More GPS snowboard tracking

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Google Earth, 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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Jan 02 2009

Tracking valuable packages (or my Son on the ski slopes)

Category: California, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Miscellaneous, Overlays, Package Tracking, Skiing — rdonat @ 12:31 pm

GPS Insight is working on a new line of package tracking devices. They’re geared toward placement in valuable shipments – plasma TV’s, cigarettes, bank bags, etc. The beauty of these units is that they don’t use only GPS signals to determine their location — they can use the E-911 cell phone system to VERY ACCURATELY determine their location.

For instance, I put one in the trunk of my car, drove into our covered concrete parking structure at the office, and this device knew where I was within 10 feet.

I put one in my oldest son’s (8) pocket (they’re very small, only a 1″ x 1″ x 2″) yesterday when we went skiing in Lake Tahoe on our yearly vacation. These units are typically used on a “every 4 hours or whenever I ask for a location” basis. Jack is a good snowboarder, but why not stick a device on him in case I lose him somewhere, right…?

[BY THE WAY, we do >> NOT << sell GPS tracking devices to people for tracking their kids, spouses, lovers, whatever -- we are strictly B2B (Business to Business)]

So Jack didn’t fall down the side of some slope and get stuck where I coudn’t find him, so the only “locate” we got on him were the “scheduled” 4:30 (MST), 3:30 PM local time ones, which were both close to the top of the Gondola (which you need to be on by 4 PM to get back down). Here are the two, and you can see they’re within .35 miles of each other (yesterday we were heading back a little earlier than the previous day since he was tired out from some longer runs):

Here’s a picture of the mountain & where the Gondola goes from the base to the mountain:

So how can I really tell where those points are (or worse case scenario, where my lost kid is if necessary)?

Here is a map of Lake Tahoe’s “Heavenly” resort:

I will put this map into a digital overlay in Google Earth so that we can see more easily where EXACTLY these GPS device locates were. This allows us to put “reality” on a map relative to “usefulness” — e.g. a ski trail map is much easier to use to locate someone than a map or satellite photo of a mountain.

I’ve never created a “vertical” overlay like this, so I think I’ll need to Photoshop this graphic a bit in order to stretch it to match the mountain.

This is a big enough exercise that it will be another blog article. I’ll post the link here when it’s done. I’m on vacation and the Gondola is closed due to wind, so I wrote this one article, but the next one will have to wait until I’m back to work most likely. I’ve got 3 more days in Tahoe, so I’m going to enjoy it and stop typing now.

Happy New Year !

Rob.

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

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