Mátra 115 Community Ultra Trail

We spent this nice weekend supporting the Mátra 115 trail with online result lists. This trail is a quite long-distance community event, 115 kms, in the Mátra mountain, Hungary.

We made some experiments as part of the online coverage: we gave a few cheap mobile GPS devices with GPRS capabilities to some participants. The next figure is a snapshot of the path with two participants on the way:



My experiments:

• actually, it IS possible to share locations online with low costs; the gps device costs around 100 USD, and woophoo is now suitable to recieve data and to provide visualization,


• cheap devices seem to work well; however, there are some drawbacks:
• we have selected two devices, that can send location data only in every 10th second as the most frequent sample,


• there are some mysterious data losses on the tracks; we haven't tested the devices carefully enough to know, if there were GPS, GSM signal losses or other problems,


• the capacity of the batteries are not the best, the units we used seem to work for about 6-8 hours under low GSM signal; however, batteries are replacable, and we can also change them for better quality ones, they are standard,


• the functionality of such a device is limited; eg. our devices have some buttons, but they are useless; they can not be configured to be used for beginning and finishing a track (the rich function set of the Woophoo Java client makes me maybe a bit critical).


• It is however a great fun to track long-distance racers online using this setup.
  

If I'll have some spare time, I'll give a detailed description on how to set up such a device and tracking environment.

New features coming

For some time past we deployed only smaller enhancements and bug fixes. However, some more interesting new features are under testing or development, and will be deployed soon. These include

• POI handling (importing, defining, querying and using POIs),
• new client - that is actually downloadable as the unstable client; the new version uses a more reliable new mapping library and has some new features.
• Since trying out the client is quite complicated, we will make the process simpler: the client app will be integrated in the webpage, as an embedded Java application. The client has a rich feature set, and it would be nice to be able to try them out easily (especially while it has some features that the website has not).
• Our main goal is still a good traffic map visualization - we are working on a newer, efficient algorithm with good prediction abilities.
• We are considering a slight design and functional change of the web site; we already have a (probably) good concept in our mind, that have to be tested a bit.
• Web site functionality is evolving contiunally. Some basic features under development are track media modification and deletion, track editing functionality, track-group statistical functions, user-user connections (friends), openid integration, gpx import/export etc.

Briefly, new features coming out continually, with some more noticeable very soon. Stay tuned, and use our community place to influence our priorities - as mainly developers, we do not always choose the best priorities. However, we know ourselfs, and are hence suggestible :)