GPS == Love
I carried my GPS everywhere on my recent skiing trip out to Winter Park, CO. In my opinion, the results were pretty awesome. I was able to finally do some analysis on my skiing and also map out where I took my on mountain photos. It was great. Here are what the daily totals look like:
The best part is that I was able to generate a great kml file (for google earth) that shows my skiing tracks by day and has pushpins for all of the photos that I took on the mountain. The pushpins are clickable and show each photo right in google earth. It’s great. The web version of google maps is also capable of displaying the kml file (just put the kml url into the maps search bar and hit the search maps button). If I was less lazy I would have the map shown here but I am lazy and also don’t want this post to slow all blog views down. Hopefully they will eventually allow me to import kml into the My Maps feature rather than having to do everything by hand (or by coding js). Here is a link to some screenshots from google earth and garmin mapsource if you don’t want to pull it up for yourself.
My little GPS is totally sweet. The hardware is great and it does almost everything I need. I find the software to be a little weak when it comes to skiing though. It does not do a good job calculating total descending vertical feet or run length and average speed. It also won’t do any geotagging of photos and really falls down when trying to work with multiple session files. So I started working on a little project in my free time. Here is a screenshot:
The app still has a long way to go (and is dependent on a full release of the msft virtual earth 3D sdk) but it at least got me some of the info I was looking for. Here is a quick rundown on what the app does: The items in the treeview are gpx files with tracks below each file entry. The box in the lower left is a vertical feet summary for all selected tracks. The top chart is a vertical feet vs. time chart with active time/altitude hover. The middle chart is an hourly descent/ascent/total chart. The map at the bottom is a virtual earth 3D control with all selected tracks and associated photos plotted. I also am going to change the middle chart to a bar chart and add some cool analytics to the top chart.
2 Responses to “GPS == Love”
totally awesome. i want it.
Thanks! I’ll post it for download once it is mildly stable.
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