Posts with how-to instructions
Part of the GPS Mapping Tutorials series.
uMap is a website which allows you to import GPX data and overlay it on an OpenStreetMap layer. This tutorial will teach you how to view GPX-formatted GPS data in uMap.
(If you don’t yet have any GPX files to view, follow one of my Recording and Extracting GPS Data to GPX tutorials.)
Continue reading “Mapping GPS Data in uMap”Part of the GPS Mapping Tutorials series.
Google Earth is a map viewer that provides an easy way to view GPS data files. This tutorial will teach you how to view GPX-formatted GPS data in Google Earth.
(If you don’t yet have any GPX files to view, follow one of my Recording and Extracting GPS Data to GPX tutorials.)
Continue reading “Mapping GPS Data in Google Earth”Part of the GPS Mapping Tutorials series.
This tutorial will teach you how to use an iOS device to log GPS data and export it to a GPX file (which can then be used by mapping software).
Continue reading “Logging GPS Tracks With iOS and MyTracks”Part of the GPS Mapping Tutorials series.
GPX (GPS Exchange format) and KML (Keyhole Markup Language) are both file types used to store GPS data. While many applications can use either file formats, Google products (Google Earth, Google My Maps) tend to prefer KML, so it’s often helpful to be able to convert between them.
(Note that both .kml and .kmz file extensions represent KML files; the latter is just a zipped version to reduce file size.)
This tutorial will teach you how to convert between GPX and KML (in both directions) using GPS Visualizer.
Continue reading “Converting GPS Data Between GPX and KML”Part of the GPS Mapping Tutorials series.
This tutorial will teach you how to record route data on a Garmin automotive GPS and extract it into a GPX file (which can then be used by mapping software).
I wrote this tutorial using a Garmin DriveSmart 50 LMT. However, I’ve had success using the same steps with other variations of the Garmin nüvi and DriveSmart series.
Continue reading “Extracting GPX Files From a Garmin Automotive GPS”While working on my various projects, I’ve dealt with various types of maps.
My Flight Historian plots flight data using the Great Circle Mapper tool. These maps are simple to generate from my flight data (I just have to pass it a plain text collection of airport codes) and easy to embed in my website. However, because they are static images, they can’t be easily panned, zoomed, or otherwise manipulated in the way that modern map websites and apps can.
On the other hand, my driving maps require too much detail for a single image, so I create them in Google Earth, which lets me manipulate the view as much as I need to. The driving data is a bit more complicated than my flight log data; while my flight log represents the abstract shortest distance straight line between two airports (and thus only requires specifying the airport at each end), a single drive can involve tens of thousands of coordinates that can be joined together, connect-the-dots style, to show the actual driving route taken.
Fortunately, all those coordinates are automatically generated and saved by my car’s GPS navigation unit in a file format called GPX (GPS Exchange Format), which is an XML-based file format which contains (among other things) latitude/longitudes sampled, in the case of my particular GPS, once per second.
Google Earth doesn’t use GPX format (though it can import it); instead, it uses a format called KML (Keyhole Markup Language, from back when Google Earth was Keyhole EarthViewer). KML is also an XML-based format, so conceptually it’s similarly a collection of coordinates that can all be joined together, with its own slightly different style.
But while GPX and KML can be used to represent complicated route shapes, they don’t have to be. These formats are both just as capable of taking a pair of points on the globe and drawing the shortest line between them. With that in mind, I decided to try to have Flight Historian automatically generate KML and GPX versions of my flight map, which would let me show my flight routes in Google Earth and Google Maps.
Continue reading “Generating GPX and KML maps with Ruby on Rails”On my Flight Historian application, a number of my pages make use of the flash and flash.now session messages capability for errors, warnings, successes, and informational messages. However, some of those pages needed to have multiple messages of the same type (e.g., multiple warnings), which flash didn’t allow me to do. Additionally, I had some views that were generating status messages of their own (for example, if a collection was empty on a page that had multiple collections), and so I ended up with several ways to generate messages that didn’t output consistent HTML.
