Come snowboard with me
Call me a geek but I thought it would be cool to carry a GPS unit with me when snowboarding this year (Obertauern, Austria) so I could track where I boarded. So shiver-me-timbers when I realised that I could load my tracks (after a bit of munging) into Google Earth and re-visit my snowboarding journey from over the last few days in 3d.
A view of my journey taken from Google Earth:
The magic really starts when you view the whole thing in Google Earth.
- Download my kml file and open it in Google Earth
- In the places menu (under temporary places) you should now have “snowboarding in Obertauern”
- The best way to view things is by completing a tour. Click on the “path” you would like to view and then click the play button below.
googleearth - For best results, set the following options in google earth: top menu->tools->options->touring tab->Driving directions tool options: Camera tilt angle: 50, Camera range: 200, Speed: 100
Converting your gps data into something Google Earth can understand
To pull the tracklog off a garmin gps into a gpx file, use gpsbabel:
sudo gpsbabel -t -D9 -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F tracklog.gpx
Then do some munging to merge all track segments together:
gpsbabel -i gpx -f tracklog.gpx -x track,pack -o gpx -F outfile.gpx
Then, to convert the file to kml (a Google Earth format):
gpsbabel -i gpx -f outfile.gpx -o kml,line_color=65660066 -F outfile.kml
I downloaded data from my gps after each morning or afternoon of boarding and ended up with 6 gpx files. To merge them all into one, I converted each one to kml (with different route colours), loaded them all into Google Earth and then saved them into one large file.
To be a bit smarter, all the above gpsbabel command lines can be merged into one, but for the purposes of clarity, they are left as individual steps.
December 23rd, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Blimey……and I said I wanted to try snowboarding!…now I can do it in the safety of my own home. FANTASTIC.
January 6th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Awesome, I’ll have to get myself a GPS for when we go over to Norway as it looks like you’ve set a trend now!
January 8th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Yay - I thoroughly recommend it! Plus you could use your tracklogs to obtain stats on your boarding (after a bit of munging) - total distanced travelled, top speed etc
If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you could even have a go at mapping the piste e.g.: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WikiProject_Val_Thorens_France
January 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Very Geeky, I love it. I’ll get my batteries charged for Norway too
There’s a fairly funky little application for the Nokia N80 that lets you send your current GPS position via GPRS to a MySQL database, with a bit of hacking about you could probably get a nice real-time online map of your progress.
Handy for the St Bernards when they need to come help drag my cold, knackered body off the piste…
January 10th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Very nice idea! Waiting for the N95 to come out so I can do cool things such as that. Enjoy Norway
April 1st, 2008 at 10:39 am
[...] last year’s snowboarding GPS fun, I decided once again to carry a GPS for this year’s trip to St Anton, so I could keep a [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
When you get a chance, run your GPX files through my processor and let me know what you think.
http://www.chuffnuts.com/pistemaps
It works out all the ascents (lifts) and descents (runs) etc, gives you distances traveled on snow versus lifts etc etc take a look.
Si