I recently had an opportunity to give a talk at 360|Flex along with Randy Troppmann. Slides and code examples are posted below. Video of the session will come sometime in the unforeseen future as they have many hours of other sessions to post-process before getting to mine.
Presentation PDF (warning: large)
MileageBuddy (viewsrc enabled)
I’m slated to speak at 360|Flex San Jose on March 7-10 on the topic of GPS data and doing neat things with it in Flex/AIR. I’ll be co-presenting along with Randy Troppmann. Randy had been doing work for quite awhile in the GPS space with his work on runningmap.com. Runningmap.com is a website that allows runners/walkers/joggers/movers to track and catalog their accomplishments. They’ve also developed an iPhone application that can record your gps track as you run. It’s quite an honor to be able to present with such an accomplished developer.
I’ve been holding off on doing a blog post about 360|Flex until I could give you a sneak peak of the new prototypes of Swift GPS. Swift GPS is a wearable hardware device that will allow you to record GPX files to a USB thumbdrive that tracks your current position and movement. During my part of this session, we’ll go into how to take this GPX data and do neat things with it in Flex like overlay the data onto a 3D map. Other highlights will be doing a bit of heat-mapping using the GPS data.
This conference WILL SELL OUT, so don’t be one of the hundreds of chumps posting regrets to your twitter account after the conference starts and you didn’t get in. Click on my 360|Flex badge on the right-side of the blog to sign up today. If I win the speaker suite for the most signups through my blog badge, I’ll give away a prototype device to one of the people who helped put me over the top. Don’t wait. Sign up today.
I’ve worked out the majority of the kinks with Swift GPS, so I’m calling it in Alpha right now. To give you a bit more information about the vision for this product, it will be a GPS track data logging device. You stick a USB thumb drive in it, and it will track the movement of your car, wife’s car, dog, RC aircraft, whatever you want to attach it to. The target market will be developers or GPS hobbyists, or geocachers who want a real challenge. It outputs a GPX data file which is nothing more than a special XML file format for GPS data. This should be useful for developers since it’s an open standard.
Click the image above for a screencast of my magnificently exciting trip to the bank. (Warning, screen recordings of Google Earth are HUGE).
I still have a few features to add such as adding a little screen so geocachers and others can view the raw lat/lon data in real-time. I ordered a book from amazon that should help me with writing the microcontroller code necessary for that piece.
This will probably be my last GPS post for quite awhile. I plan on going back to your regularly scheduled “Flex Junk” in the near future.
This blog’s comment section has been pretty quiet for some time. Any comments on this project would be appreciated. Even if it’s just to say, “Go back to posting on Flex topics dude!”
Well, my GPS device is coming along. I’m getting my first batch of data off the board that is close to usable. I walked it to the end of my block and back at night with all the lights blinking and flashing on the board. The neighbors probably think I’m a terrorist building a bomb or something. Looks like I need to add a bit of code to ignore points whose accuracy is in question. The start of my walk was all over the place (in my neighbors living room if you believe the device), but by the end, it seemed to hone in and nail down my position pretty well.
I’m targeting this device to output GPX data which should be an easily readable XML format for Flex/AIR developers to use. Right now, the screenshot you’re viewing is from Google Earth which also accepts GPX data files.
My Cluttered Desk
I’ve started a new project. It’s quite a bit different than the Flex/AIR stuff I’ve been posting about in the past. My day job is still doing Flex/AIR, so consider this a minor interruption in your regularly scheduled programming.
In my home office, my desktop is now cluttered with the tools of the trade. I’ve figured out how to wire a demo GPS board to my microcontroller development board. The whole mess is wired to my laptop using a USB cable. I write C code on the laptop that I can push down to the microcontroller for testing and debugging. The first major hurdle has been cleared which is getting the devices talking to each other.
I hope to post updates every so often on the project. In some ways, I guess it’s somewhat Flex/AIR related since the device (when released) will eventually target other developers who can do some interesting things in their software with it.