A New Running Map
August 1, 2011 11:34 AM Subscribe
A New Running Map
The first of a serious of neat little side projects from my usual work on MapBox and the like - a new kind of map (I call it a 'squiggle') and a new pretty map. But, hopefully a lot more than that - I documented the process of creating the map in serious detail, and it goes over re-teaching myself high school trig, writing a scraper for Garmin Connect, trying to fake being a real artist, and figuring out some new map interactions. There's more to come, and ideally this convinces the big groups that hold onto our data to let us get at it to make more beautiful things.
The first of a serious of neat little side projects from my usual work on MapBox and the like - a new kind of map (I call it a 'squiggle') and a new pretty map. But, hopefully a lot more than that - I documented the process of creating the map in serious detail, and it goes over re-teaching myself high school trig, writing a scraper for Garmin Connect, trying to fake being a real artist, and figuring out some new map interactions. There's more to come, and ideally this convinces the big groups that hold onto our data to let us get at it to make more beautiful things.
Role: programmer, designer, author
Nice work. I know absolutely nothing about programming you did, but could you have got the data more easily (i.e. avoided the scraper) by exporting the data from the training centre software?
I exported all of the runs I did with my club and plotted them on a google map using gps-visualizer . The inherent small scatter in GPS data meant the roads we ran down most often were "thicker", thereby creating a sort of heat map.
posted by trialex at 8:19 PM on August 2, 2011
I exported all of the runs I did with my club and plotted them on a google map using gps-visualizer . The inherent small scatter in GPS data meant the roads we ran down most often were "thicker", thereby creating a sort of heat map.
posted by trialex at 8:19 PM on August 2, 2011
Yep - unfortunately I take the route of going straight from my watch to Garmin Connect. It's worked out because I've churned through four laptops in the time I've used the service, but yep - if I were to use Training Center that'd remove a big bottleneck, and I'm considering doing it in the future.
Very cool about the scatter! I've been wondering whether there's any value to extract from it - for instance, seeing offset from road centerline to point and thus using scatter to determine GPS strength at each point.
posted by tmcw at 5:08 AM on August 3, 2011
Very cool about the scatter! I've been wondering whether there's any value to extract from it - for instance, seeing offset from road centerline to point and thus using scatter to determine GPS strength at each point.
posted by tmcw at 5:08 AM on August 3, 2011
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