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GPS Archive: GPS

February 23, 2010

Google Earth for Android devices

Google has finally released Google Earth for Android 2.1 devices. This includes the Nexus One out of the box and the Motorola Droid with an upcoming update. In what seems to be a faithful mobile rendition of their popular desktop app, Google has once again brought the world into the palm of your hand. Noteworthy features in this release include a new road layer and voice search. [via androidandme]

January 22, 2010

The Frustromantic Box: A reverse geocache puzzle

Mikal Hart's original "reverse geocache" puzzle ended up making a big splash when we first posted about it last October. Now Russ Weeks has produced his own version using an Arduino, an HD44780 display, a servo, and an EM406 GPS. Like Mikal's version, Russ's puzzle will only open in one particular location on the surface of the Earth. If it's elsewhere, pushing the button just gives a readout of the linear distance to the location it wants.

January 5, 2010

Map-inspired paintings

With GPS units shining from dashboards and Google Maps just a click away, maps have never been more of a part of our culture than they are now. Joshua Huyser's cartographical explorations embrace such concepts as travel, movement, paths, and directions.

Here's what Huyser's cryptic artist's statement has to say:

My senses are to blame. I am immersed in life and, suddenly, I am moved. Not physically, but inside. This internal shift must be reconciled. It is the spark that initiates locomotion. It is nothing but a morsel, a crude statement. It is a notion, a note... a thought. It requires clarification, elaboration, but there is a delicate fog obscuring the path. In the murkiness I am confronted with options, forks stumbling to dead ends. Backtracking. It seems impossible, but I try to trust myself. I must, for the answer comes from a secret place unbeknownst to me. The undertaking is frenetic in the beginning. There is unrest. The vibrations continue to propel me forward. My mind's eye is filled with the potential that must be negotiated. I push forward and build as I would a novel or piece of music, slowly wading through the mist. Eventually the quivering stills and it is done. A successful culmination is a symphony. It was inside of me and now it is out. It is a soliloquy. It is the world through me. It is from me to you. Don't analyze. Just allow it to pass through you.

See Huyser's mnartists.org page for more information.

November 16, 2009

The Bloop of Cthulhu?

This may be one of those situations where my love of a good story gets me in trouble with the more hard-minded scientific types among you, so please understand first that this is all intended in fun. Nonetheless, there are some intriguing facts here.

During the summer of 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) repeatedly detected an extremely powerful underwater sound on an array of Cold War era hydrophones originally installed to listen for soviet submarines. "While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth." Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, purportedly "agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin," although his opinion appears to be in the minority. (Both quotes from this article at CNN.com.) The approximate origin of the sound has been identified as 50 S x 100 W, which is almost exactly the same latitude as Lovecraft's fictitious sunken city of R'lyeh, at 48 S x 123 W, although it is 1000 miles distant in terms of longitude. [Thanks, Maredith!]

You can listen to a sped-up version of "The Bloop" on the NOAA website here.

November 13, 2009

Regular GPS not accurate enough? Try RTK-GPS!

Want to fly your plane or drive your car using GPS signals, but finding that your receiver just isn't accurate enough to make things work? Well, MAKE subscriber Bruce Mueller writes in to point us at an impressive solution: an open-source real time kinematic GPS receiver. Researchers Tomoji Takasu and Akio Yasuda of Tokyo University developed the RTKLIB library to perform the RTK-GPS calculations, and then ported the whole thing to run on a low-cost beagle board and commodity GPS receiver. Want to try it out? Full source code, circuit layouts and instructions are provided on their site.

So, how does it work? A GPS receiver normally works by measuring the delay between an internally generated signal and one received by a satellite. This specially crafted signal makes it possible for the GPS receiver to find and latch onto the satellites signal, however it's wavelength limits the accuracy of the receiver. The real time kinematic system gets around this limitation by measuring the phase delay in the carrier signal. Because this signal has a much sorter wavelength, it is possible to make a system that is accurate to the centimeter.

Google Maps Navigation ported to G1 & MyTouch

If you own an older Android phone and were curious about Google Maps Navigation, but were afraid to ask, here's instructions to get it running. [via AndroidCentral]

November 5, 2009

Nonexistent town in Google maps

Interesting article in the Telegraph about "Argleton," a town that appears in Google maps but does not, apparently, exist in the real world. The best theory I've heard is that the town is a "trap" intended to catch those who steal map data. [Thanks, Glen!]

October 19, 2009

GPS-enabled puzzle box opens only at Île-de-Bréhat, France

The first presenter at last Thursday's Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his "Reverse Geocaching Puzzle." Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 attempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.

October 1, 2009

My people call them maize mazes

Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:

A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!

September 30, 2009

DIY Street View camera

As part of a course at the United States Military Academy at West Point, maker Roy D. Ragsdale developed a prototype Street View-like camera using a laptop, $300 in off-the-shelf components, and open source software. A Python script captures eight 1280x1024px JPEG files that are then stitched together and uploaded to Google Earth.

Construction was straightforward. On a flat octagonal heavy-cardboard base, I glued small posts for the cameras' clips to latch onto. I aligned each unit and then placed the USB hubs and the GPS receiver in the middle. I secured the cables with Velcro and sandwiched everything with another piece of cardboard. The whole thing's the size of a small pizza box, weighing less than 1 kilogram. Excluding the notebook (a 2-gigahertz machine with 512 megabytes of RAM running Ubuntu Linux), the hardware cost about $300.

[thanks, Erico]

September 25, 2009

Layar AR goes 3D

Layar, the augmented reality app for the Android platform will be incorporating 3D capabilities into the application in November. They've released a tech preview this week for PICNIC '09 in Amsterdam. The preview, which is available from the Android Market (and only works with-in and around the PICNIC festival) is a significant improvement over flat pins on a map and hopefully encourages people to further investigate the use of augmented reality.

[via androidworld.nl]

September 4, 2009

GPS beatmapping

Face Removal Services brings us the GPS Beatmap -

Looping musical phrases are represented on a map as overlapping circular territories. As the vehicle approaches the center of a circle, the volume increases. In areas of the map where territories overlap the vehicle generates dynamic mixes of the overlapping musical phrases. By exploring a very large map of many overlapping territories the Beatmap creates complex, dynamic mash-ups.

The map can be explored on foot, by plane, boat, train, or automobile. In this footage the map is explored by car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, allowing the user to freely accelerate, swerve, and slam to a stop for optimum musical control of the instrument.

A bit more description available on their site. [via CDM]

August 14, 2009

Nokia N97 GPS antenna hack

Some N97 owners find the integrated GPS doesn't perform as well as they'd like, so they've taken it upon themselves to render a proper fix. Using a copper wire attached to the existing antenna, Symbian Freak contributors Bruno and Teo have greatly improved their signal strength and can go about geocaching with fewer dropped signals.

[via Symbian Freak]

August 12, 2009

Flashback: Solar-powered bike GPS

"During the summertime, I'll disappear for hours on long rides to nowhere and back. But I have to admit on some rides I've gotten so lost I have trouble finding my way home. Happily I was able to build a solar-powered GPS mapping machine, mostly from old computer parts and software I had sitting around my office." Author Brian Nadel's words in the introduction to his DIY Outdoors piece, "Solar-Powered Bike GPS," from the pages of MAKE Volume 10, are further testament to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention. Brian's homespun bike GPS cost him next to nothing to make because he had most of the parts on hand already (ah, the endless parts bin for that maybe-someday project do come in handy). He estimates the project would run about $150 total by combing through eBay and closeout retailers. Naturally, with the abundant varieties of bike, PDA, GPS receiver, and solar panel, you likely have to improvise for your personal combo but seeing how Brian set his up is the insight you need.

Here is the full article in our Digital Edition. No better time than a sunny summer day to get crackin on this project.

You can still pick up a back issue of MAKE Volume 10 in the Maker Shed.

June 12, 2009

Record-vying transatlantic robot submarine at sea

The Scarlet Knight, named for sponsoring Rutgers University's mascot, is a cruise-missile-shaped autonomous ROV that was launched off the New Jersey coastline on April 27. If all goes according to plan, the Rutgers team will recover it off the westernmost coast of Spain right around Christmas day. That happy event would mark the first successful underwater crossing of the Atlantic by an unmanned vehicle. At the mission website, you can track the robot's position using Google Earth, monitor her battery status, and follow the team's navigation blog.

May 1, 2009

GPS on iPod nano

Using a GPS reference board and an Atmel ATMEGA324 microcontroller, engineer Bengamin Kokes has created a prototype GPS peripheral for his iPod nano. To display coordinates, the device uses Advanced iPod Remote commands to send a 4-color image to the iPod screen, a technique Kokes picked up after seeing it implemented in an Alpine car stereo.

iPod GPS [via Hack a Day]

April 15, 2009

Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition

Sixteen teams gathered today to determine whose autonomously-navigating vehicle would be the fastest around the Sparkfun headquarters in Boulder, CO.

Four-wheeled rovers (typically built on RC car platforms) dominated the entries, but there were three flying UAVs, and one spheroid (Nathan, with "labrat", pictured at right). One team had been designed a tethered model rocket to fly the course, but, unfortunately, didn't compete.

The race was structured as 3 heats. Each vehicle got 5 minutes to attempt a run; best time overall won the competition.

The first heat got off to a rough start. Only about half of the robots made it to the first corner of the building, and only the Mookie Mobile Death Pod 3000 made it around the whole course.

A slight wind from the West seemed to be affecting the DIY Drones's ability to precisely line up with the course route. It completed many test runs very well, but its first two official runs were disqualified for slightly cutting the corner of the course. The plane also found itself in multiple trees. The Boulder Fire Department was kind enough to help out with one, and other was low enough to get by hand.

The ground-based vehicles had other obstacles to deal with, including curbs, and people who foolishly think that curbs are a safe place to stand.

After nearly hitting its creator, Ohcraptheresalake! (who later went on to discover the creek) goes after innocent bystanders:
Entrants used the time between heats to tweak their robots according to the lessons learned from the previous run. Death Pod 3000, the only robot to complete the course in the first heat, solidified its lead in the second by lowering its time to 1:28.

In the end, though, the DIY Drones team scored a stunning success with their final try, with Chris Anderson's UAV completing the course in 36 seconds to win the tile!

The competition is over! Diy drones is 1st, with deathpod3000 taking the Engineers Choice award. Thanks for following!!! See you next year!

Jordi launches the DIY Drones UAV:
This robot used sparklers to avoid collisions with pedestrians:
All set on the starting line:

More:

Sparkfun's coverage
Sparkfun's twitter feed, with reports and pictures.
Competition page
Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Blog

April 4, 2009

TouchTable map

This is a neat Touchable map via Wired Science. I wonder if Apple has a patent on the multitouch for non-portable applications.

He says it was designed for kids to learn geography, but it appears that the Department of Education was not paying the bill. It's kind of like the interactive LED table from EMS, but way more expensive and militaristic.

February 13, 2009

Lamps made from slides and film

Artist and MAKE subscriber Michael Marcovici sent us the link to these amazing lamps he made out of mounted slides and reels of film. While you're at his site, check out his other amazing work.

Lights

GPS mapping meetup in NYC - 2/21 & 2/22

There's an OpenStreetMaps group mapping going down in Manhattan next weekend, no prior GPS-ing required -

OpenStreetMap is only as good as the contributions of the people who edit it. To encourage and help people to edit, experienced mappers run Mapping Parties. The public is invited to them. Often the organiser has GPS receivers to loan out. The attendees receive instruction in the use of the GPS receiver. The simplest way to record information is to take waypoints, and write down notes about that waypoint number on paper. There are more efficient methods, but require more fussy fiddling and aren't appropriate for the beginner.

When they return to the venue with a list of waypoints, the experienced mapper(s) help them download them off the GPS receiver and load them into an OpenStreetMap editor such as JOSM. The points get converted into Map Features and the hand written information is entered. The data gets uploaded to the map and made available to the world.

The Mapping Party is a convivial, community event. After the mapping is finished, the participants share food and drinks, and enjoy themselves. It's a party, after all!

More info available on OpenStreetMaps' site plus be sure to RSVP. [via NYCResistor]

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