Real-time mapping of your trip with SPOT and CartoDB

In my last blog post, we saw how we could synchronize data from a SPOT unit to a CartoDB table. Today, I wanted to test if the system worked. As I'm currently staying on a small island, long hikes are very limited, so I decided to go around the island with my kayak. It takes me about an hour.

GPS studies on a small island can be extremely hard :-)

Before I started my journey, I created a new shared page on my SPOT account. I also adjusted the tracking interval on my SPOT to 5 minutes, which would give me about 12 locations around the island.

The shared page need to be "Active" to have access to the location feed.

This gave me an URL to a public map (valid for 7 days only!):

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0pGqOT43h6tTRcGJujqltqRYE3rHNu6db

It's not the best design I've seen, but it works. We'll soon create our own map.

The map URL also gave me the feed id: "0pGqOT43h6tTRcGJujqltqRYE3rHNu6db". With this id we have access to a feed with our locations, updated real-time:
https://api.findmespot.com/spot-main-web/consumer/rest-api/2.0/public/feed/0pGqOT43h6tTRcGJujqltqRYE3rHNu6db/message.json

I've made a copy as the locations will be deleted after 7 days:

I also started my cron job from last blog post, so the location data was automatically synced to my CartoDB-account. I'm including the feed id in my spot location table, so I can have store multiple trips in the same table by filtering on the id:

SELECT * FROM spot WHERE feed_id = '0pGqOT43h6tTRcGJujqltqRYE3rHNu6db'

Then it was easy to create a simple map in CartoDB just showing the locations:

In the next blog post, we'll create a more custom map experience with Leaflet. Stay tuned!

Comments

Creating a WebGL Earth with three.js

This blog post will show you how to create a WebGL Earth with three.js , a great JavaScript library which helps you to go 3D in the browser. I was surprised how easy it seemed when reading a blog post by Jerome Etienne . So I decided to give it a try using earth textures from one of my favourite cartographers, Tom Patterson . WebGL is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics in modern web browsers without the use of plug-ins. Three.js is built on top of WebGL, and allows you to create complex 3D scenes with a few lines of JavaScript. If your browser supports WebGL you should see a rotating Earth below: [ Fullscreen ] To be able to display something with three.js, you need three things: a scene, a camera and a renderer. var width = window.innerWidth, height = window.innerHeight; var scene = new THREE.Scene(); var camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(45, width / height, 0.01, 1000); camera.position.z = 1.5; var rende...

Terrain building with three.js

In my last blog post , we converted a digital elevation model (DEM) to a WebGL-friendly format ( i.e. easy to transfer and parse by JavaScript in the browser). In this blog post, we'll use the elevation data to build a terrain mesh with three.js . First we need to transfer the terrain data to the browser. The elevation values are stored in a binary file as 16-bit unsigned integers. This page explains how you can send and receive binary data using JavaScript typed arrays. I've created a TerrainLoader by adapting the XHRLoader . You can also use this function: function loadTerrain(file, callback) { var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.responseType = 'arraybuffer'; xhr.open('GET', file, true); xhr.onload = function(evt) { if (xhr.response) { callback(new Uint16Array(xhr.response)); } }; xhr.send(null); } Loading elevation data with the Terrai...

Creating 3D terrains with Cesium

Previously, I’ve used three.js to create 3D terrain maps in the browser ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ). It worked great for smaller areas, but three.js doesn’t have built-in support for tiling and advanced LOD algorithms needed to render large terrains. So I decided to take Cesium for a spin. Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in the browser without a plugin. Like three.js, it uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics. Cesium allows you to add your own terrain data, and this blog post will show you how. Impressed by the terrain rendering in @CesiumJS - with a 10m elevation model for Norway! Farewell Google Earth. pic.twitter.com/RQKvfu2hBb — Bjørn Sandvik (@thematicmapping) October 4, 2014 Compared to the dying Google Earth plugin , it's quite complicated to get started with Cesium. The source code is well documented and the live coding Sandcastle is great, but there is a lack of tutorials and my development slows down when ...

MasterMaps

Search This Blog