Archive for the 'GPS' Category

Juicy Geography mobile

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 23, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth, ICT and Photographs. 0 Comments

I have added the first of my Yellow Arrows to two locations in North Devon that are important to me. The others will be used in a Geography/Art collaboration
project.

This is the very first arrow:

shop

 There are lots of surf shops in North Devon, the arrow is placed on the window of the only shop manufacturing surfboards locally. If you’re in Braunton, text the code on the arrow to the SMS number provided, for a personal message!

This arrow has been placed somewhere on a beach. I’m not saying which beach, or where the arrow is located, but it’s not hard to find!

beachyellow
There’s a message for weekend / London surfers to be discovered.

Tomorrow I will be moblogging directly from a GCSE fieldtrip on Exmoor, (providing there’s an Orange signal!) I will also be testing some handheld GPS units and Phone2GEarth as well. The idea is to use the the phone to locate and photograph the fieldwork sites. The phone images will be geotagged in the evening.

The moblog link is here

The handheld GPS units will be used in conjunction with a traditional gun clinometer to measure the gradient of the river bed and the valley sides. The results will be available on this site in .gpx format so that they can be viewed in GPS Visualizer. It will be interesting to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional method compared to the modern.

Phone2GEarth

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 17, 2006 in GPS and Google Earth. 2 Comments

I’ve tried out a little mobile phone application called “Phone 2 Google Earth” The program communicates with a bluetooth GPS and records your position at regular intervals for as long as required. You can also record placemarks. The data is saved as a KML file, which can be transferred from the phone to a PC. Here is an example google earth file .

llamasclick to enlarge

The llamas featured as a placemark can be seen on my moblog.

The colour and opacity of the track can be modified once it has been imported to Google Earth via the advanced tab. It would be nice if there was an option to output the data as a GPX file which would preserve other aspects of the GPS log, such as speed and altitude, giving you the choice as to whether to use Google Earth or GPS Visualizer to view the data. As a basic tracking program however, Phone2GEarth works very well, and I’ll use it for fieldwork.

EarthPlot software

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 4, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth and ICT. 1 Comment

I’ve just noticed that Earth Plot have released Earth Paint. I’ve had a quick go and I’m very impressed at the ease with which you can draw freehand shapes and polygons onto Google Earth. Third party applications such as Earth Paint and GPS Visualizer seem to have made Google Earth Plus somewhat redundant.

3D Tracking

Published by Noel Jenkins on February 11, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth and Google Maps. 1 Comment

Having acquired my new phone (Nokia 6630) and a cheap Bluetooth GPS from EBay. I’ve finally been able to test 3dtracking.net
It all works just as advertised on the web site. Simply install a small application on your mobile, turn on a Bluetooth GPS and walk around. Your location is transmitted by the mobile to the 3dtracking server which draws your track live on a Google Map or in Google Earth.

3dtrackingclick to enlarge

A practical fieldwork application still eludes me, but I’m working on it!

FlickrFly

Published by Noel Jenkins on January 30, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth and Photographs. 0 Comments

This excellent little script is working again. Go to FlickrFly site.

Simply add a tiny snippet of code to a description of a geotagged photo in Flickr, and on clicking the newly created link, you fly to that location in Google Earth.

Here is an example of a photograph tagged with Flickr Fly Click “Fly to this location” to see the effect. You need Google Earth installed obviously!

Semapedia

Published by Noel Jenkins on January 24, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth and Photographs. 1 Comment

I’m rapidly talking myself into getting a smartphone. Not just for the live GPS tracking (see previous post), but because of concepts like Semapedia. In essence, Semapedia is about tagging real world locations with internet-based information, via a mobile phone. This could be a great (and highly subversive) fieldwork activity. Ogle Earth has posted an interesting article about Semapedia, together with a link to a Google Earth file for viewing some of the recently tagged locations.

I’ve printed out my first Semapedia tags - can you guess where they are going?

update 29/1/06 - I’ve just addded my first Semipedia tagged image to Flickr. The image is also tagged with the Flickr Fly script - see this page for more details

A GPS enabled digital camera

Published by Noel Jenkins on January 24, 2006 in GPS and Photographs. 2 Comments

Ricoh have introduced a new camera which is able to add location data to photos as they are taken. This would be brilliant for fieldwork. An idea of the likely cost, and more details about the camera may be found at GeoSpatial Experts