Deb Bassett - Urbanwide

Snowboarding GPS Foo

After 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 record of where we boarded.

Using Rob’s, now slightly battered, Garmin Etrex Legend C, I set the GPS to record our location every 2 seconds and put it in my jacket pocket for the day.

At the end of each day, I downloaded our traces from the GPS onto my laptop using GPSBabel, then at the end of the trip, loaded them all into Google Earth and munged them around a bit (mostly cosmetic) and saved them all into one KML file.

If you fancy having a look at where we boarded, download the KML file here (right click and save), and open it in Google Earth.

More detailed instructions here from last year’s trip to Obertauern

If you don’t feel like downloading Google Earth, here’s a less interesting 2D Google Maps version

Update: see our photos from the trip

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.

1. Download my kml file and open it in Google Earth
2. In the places menu (under temporary places) you should now have “snowboarding in Obertauern”
3. 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
4. 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.