You might remember that on the Solar Tour last year I used RoboGeo and a Garmin Etrex to enable an internet based track and tagged photo stream. The Etrex would do the tracking and every time I stopped I would download the track, to a UMPC, download the images I’d taken and run them through RoboGeo which would match the timestamps on the images to the position at that time according to the track. I would then export a kml file which would be uploaded to my website and automatically pulled into my Google Map. It was about the easiest way to do it then (see my day-plan for more info on it) but a lot has changed now!

Recently I bought a Nokia N82 smartphone which has built in GPS. Google Maps has been great fun to play with on a phone and even more fun was the beta release of Nokia Maps 2.0 which added satellite imagery, internet search, live traffic and a pedestrian mode. The other application I found was the Nokia Sports tracker. This phone-based applciation does the same job as my old Etrex in that it logs data and shows statistics pretty much as the Etrex did. The best part of it though is that you can authorise the software to send data to an online Sportstracker account, live! Users accessing the current activity on the website can then see your location in real time overlayed on a Google Map. Fantastic! Once you’ve finished your activity the program then goes through your photos looking at the timestamps and offers to upload them all with GeoTags to the same Sportstracker service. With a few simple steps, the track is automatically overlayed with image pointers. Groovy!

Here’s a public ‘track’ I made on SportsTracker.
http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=74767

With one more step, you can export the KML file and import it into a Google MyMap thus breaking it out of the Nokia Sportstracker website and making it easier to share and add mroe info too. There’s one more thing though. I didn’t quite fancy my images being stored at the sportstracker website so I’m using Shozu to auto-tag and upload to Flickr. Using a great tip I picked up from TheNokiaBlog I found out how you can auto-link a geofeed from Flicker and have it show up live on a Google Map. The only thing missing is being able to auto-export the track in the same, live, way from Sportstracker online, or the Sportstracker app on the phone, to Google Maps. I’m sure that will come soon though as it seems like an obvious way to make live people-location mashups and create even more excitement over the location aware possibilities with Nokia phones.

Here’s a map I prepared earlier!

View Larger Map

I’m sure that we’ll see Nokia combining Maps2.0 and some form of live tracking soon. It would be so much fun to see where your friends are and what they’re doing. Can you imagine that in a very short time we’ll be able to link this into live personal video too for the ultimate GeoVideo experience!

One problem with all this is that it takes a lot of battery power from the phone. Where I was getting 20 hours from two AA batteries, the Nokia N82 will last for 3 hours if you set it up correctly using lower-power GSM-based data. If you use 3G data, your battery life will suffer even more and you’ll see soemthing less than 1.5 hours. You might need to take a spare phone with you or turn off the live upload feature which will give you all-day tracking. Even if you upload every time you take a break, its a lot easier than using the manual process I was using before.

Goodbye Garmin Etrex! Goodbye Robo Geo!

Planning a busman’s holiday around the weather isn’t that easy. Camp set-up and break down, cycling between locations, working, keeping an eye on the weather, finding suitable places to work and charging power sources all need to be thought about. The key to success here (in our wonderfully changeable weather system) is to be flexible between 10:00 and 16:00 when there’s a possibility to get something out of the sun. Outside these hours there isn’t enough power in the sunlight to make it worth any effort or planning.

The original plan was to cycle during the day with the solar panel across the back of the bike however, a 25W panel is too big to lay in a useful, efficient position across the back of the bike so either I suffer with 50% energy loss or I stop when the sun shines. Having thought about it for about 2 seconds I think the latter idea is rather good and in fact, the objective of the tour is not to cycle as far as possible, its to test and learn about how UMPCs can be used and powered in mobile situations.

A rough dry-day plan could go like this.

• 0730-0830 wake up. Check email/RSS, Cuppa, Breakfast and pack up.
• 0845-1100 on the road for a concentrated 40km ride. Panel 50% deployed on bike but not expecting any usable power at this time of day.
• 1100-1600 Weather watch! If its sunny then stop and charge! Work, play, read, eat during this time. If not sunny try to get to campsite before midday in order to deploy trickle charge solution. Best charging period is 1200-1400 here.
• 1700-1900 If not already at campsite, set up tent. Find food. Shower. Food. Relax. Connect mobile phone and AA batteries for top-up from lead-acid battery.
• 1900-2100 Work (max 1.5 hours)
• 2100-2130 Prep for morning.
• 2200-2300 To bed with RSS, emails or book. Pray for sun! Earplugs in (camping by the Rhein is always noisy) and sleep…

Next job is to get the Google map started. I’m using RoboGeo to generate a live route map (here’s one I prepared earlier!) with images but I’d like to merge Google ‘My Map’  KML data with it so that I can build more than just a track map. If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know.

Update: I worked it out. You can create the My Map in Google Maps by doing the usual drag a nd drop, draw etc etc. Then export the KML. Uload the KML to your web server and add the following two red lines into your RoboGeo ‘map.htm’ file after the ‘var map’ line. Obviously you need to adjust the URL to point to the KML file you uploaded.

var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(“map”));
var geoXml = new GGeoXml(“http://www.solar-
umpc.com/images/moblog-30-4-07/SolarUMPCTour.kml”);
map.addOverlay(geoXml);

Once you’ve done that, upload the RoboGeo dir to your server and link to the map.htm file.

Here’s one I’ve just made with a previous RoboGeo route and photos and if you zoom out you’ll see the start and endpoint for the tour and the current location of my bike. The great thing about it is that as you update your ‘My Map’ the created map changes too as it pulls in all the data from the Google servers. Wonderful!

I’m now off to do a bit of shopping. Packet soup, sultanas and muesli bars. Yum yum! create some maps!