Tag Archive for 'Navigation'

The Green Chile Revelation

We’re lost. Somewhere between Santa Fe and… well, practically nothing (apart from the border of Utah maybe). We took one wrong turn and rolled on and on for about an hour and a half before we even knew we were no longer on our route. There’s shrubbery everywhere. As far as the eye can see. At least as far as the snow-covered mountains we can make out on the horizon. Shrubbery anyway. There’s no better way to express it. For half an eternity we feel we’re driving along shrubbery. There’s not much forest in the Carson National Forest, as far as we can tell.

We end up in El Rito. Long before we see the first buildings we can see the single white letter “E” painted on a mountain side in the distance. At first glance El Rito has not much to offer than a long winding main street with traditional adobe buildings lined up to the right and left. We make a stop at El Llano Bar. There are two vintage gas pumps in front of it that are – let’s say – in an advanced state of decay. The sign above the door is a little too big and the rivets that keep it in place are amazingly irregularly placed on the wall. It is crooked. At first glance one might take the rivets for bullet holes. They are not. Just rivets.

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by Alex | January 3, 2010 | 0 Comments
Images, Research and Travel

GPS Logging: Going straight through walls

Man, feels almost like in a post office these days. The i-Blue 747 GPS Logger arrived at our offices today and is put to the acid test right away. The little bugger is able to record up to 150,000 way points. Depending on your pre-determined log interval that’s enough for more than a day in the field. In connection with a bluetooth-enabled notebook or mobile phone you can also use it for GPS navigation.

It comes with software that allows you to configure it and download the recorded geo data. While it took me three attempts to get the software running and to detect the device connection, configuration of the logger itself was fairly simple. For the beginning I set the logging interval to 1 second and every 10 meters. And since we want to use it to tag our photos with GPS information, I grabbed the camera and the logger and went for a little walk. Important note: You first need to make sure that the clock in your camera is matched to the clock of the logger. Syncing of your photos to geo data is solely based on time.

So I went around the block and downloaded the recorded data via the software that also allows you to immediately draw a path in GoogleEarth. At first glance I’d say I had a blood alcohol content of at least 0.2 percent and bashed my ahead against the wall several times. Well, I better zoom out and look at it from a high altitude, so the path looks not so staggered anymore. Obviously measuring accuracy has some room for improvement. But what about geo-tagging of my photos?

The i-Blue’s software itself is not capable of photo tagging. So you first need to save the gps information to a file – you can either choose between saving it to Google’s .kmz-format to load your path into Google Earth, or .nmea-format. For now we need the latter one.

I’m going to use Copiks PhotoMapper, a free software to match your photos to your gps log file. It is simple and rather self-explanatory: Choose “Import GPS Data” from the menu to load your .nmea-file. It will immediately draw your path on a small map. Then choose “Import Images” from the same menu and open the photos you want to tag. Again, the software immediately does its job, matching longitude and latitude to your images. That’s it. Now just select all images and save them into a .kmz-file.

You can now load your .kmz-file into Google Earth…. et voila, there you have it: your tagged photos! Guess what, it doesn’t look too bad. In fact, almost each one of them is placed at the right spot, some more, some less. But overall it pretty good. Now if deactivate your zigzag path no one will ever notice any measuring inaccuracy. Hooray! Click here to download the .kmz-file from my little test and have a look at it for yourself.

by Alex | September 29, 2009 | 0 Comments
Equipment

New companions: Navigon 4310 and GPS logger

Delivery service just rang! Making travel arrangements for our research trip sometimes feels like christmas, as we are getting little gift packages almost on a daily basis. This time it’s a Navigon 4310 max, so we are making sure not to lose our way in the USA. Thanks to the kind people at Navigon who provide this one for our trip. Usually the 4310 max comes with only European maps, but it seems as if they made an exception for us :)

Note the small label on the lower left corner… I bet this’ll help us find remote and secret access roads to Area 51! (Click to enlarge)

Speaking of GPS, navigation and geoinformation: To be able to tag the photos we are going to take, we just purchased an i-Blue 747 GPS Logger at everybody’s favorite online auction house. For a mere 45 dollars. The i-Blue 747 tracks itineraries and geoinformation that can be synchronized to Exif information of digital photos. I don’t know yet how (good) that’s gonna work out, but will keep you posted as soon as this little gadget gets dropped off… Like christmas, as I said.

by Esther | September 25, 2009 | 4 Comments
Travel and Equipment