Potty Page

June 23, 2007

All kinds of GPS fun

Jeeze! This month's going quick! Yeah, it's been rather quiet on the blogging front.

This is mainly due to me being rather busy writing up my thesis... I've almost got a chapter done. Kick ass. Although I feel that the chapter I've completed is probably the easy chapter... and the ones that are to come will be more difficult to write :-( Not so kick ass!

I've also being busying myself trying to get my phone to log my whereabouts using a bluetooth GPS receiver.It actually works quite well!

I've got the idea from Joe, who's using similar technology to track his trip from Calais to Casablanca. However, unlike him, I'm a cheapskate so I've not got mine to update in realtime (yet). Kinda means that I can 'edit' where I've been should I take my phone and gps dodah into a whore house and don't want you to know which whore I use, for example.

Currently it saves it onto the memory card on my computer and then I can make .kml files or .gpx files or whatever.

I've also thought of the posibility of using it to do geotagging of photos (so I can make my photomap bigger with ease)... If I sync my camera clock with the clock from the GPS and ta da... I can correlate the photos, so I know where I was stood when I pointed and clicked.

So... what software am I using to do all the funky stuff?

Well... I'm logging the GPSness onto my phone using a version of Mobile Trail Explorer, which I have modified to suit my needs.

I was going to grow my own software that would correlate the time on the photos to the position I was stood in... however I stumbled across gpscorrelate, which does the job prefectly! Basically, it adds the longitude and latitude to the EXIF data in the JPEG.

In order to add this to my photo map I've written a script that'll search through the photos in the gallery and find any with the extra EXIF tags, it'll then add the data to the custom fields that I already had set up for the photomap.

I'm a little narked off with my phone to behonest - it won't let me background a java midlet (as far as I can tell) this means that when the tracking software is running I can't do anything else with the phone, nor can I put the bloody keypad lock on! So, if it's in my pocket there's a big bloody chance I'll cancel the recording without knowing that I've done it! Much poo. At the moment during testing it's travelling around with me in an icecream tub, in my backpack! Not ideal :-(

So, does it all work? As if you ever doubted that it would!

That's a random trip around campus I made on my way home from work yesterday. There's no photo 'cause I've not tested that in a reallife situation yet - although I see no reason why it won't work!

Posted by Ed at June 23, 2007 10:56 AM | Geek |