Not that I exactly know what the rest of the day entails, but I do have a very nice poncho and will be going out after posting this. Please, if any geeks are reading this and have ideas, I need to hear them!
Here's the challenge: I can see from Google maps what roads I want to take to go places, but to be able to follow the directions and have a pleasant bike ride, it involves needing to turn the directions/map created by Google Maps into a course route that can be uploaded into my Garmin GPS. (As I've said before, street names are worthless along with Google route directions.)
From what I've found in researching today: Garmin's courses are XML and so long as you have latitude and longitude points, it's not difficult to simply create one's own XML course file.
The problem boils down to this, then: I want a listing of all of the necessary latitude/longitude points to create a reasonable course to follow. With these data points, all is well. In Google maps, one can right-click on a point and the lat/long coordinates are shown to the user. At this point, I just copy/paste into Excel & have formulas there take care of creating the XML file. Great--but I don't love the time that has to be spent clicking on the map and pulling off the lat/long data.
If any of you have ideas as to anything out there to solve this problem, I'll give you a virtual pat on the back. From my Google searches, I'm surprised to not find much of anything available.
I'm pleased, however, to report that this is (though time-consuming) entirely possible as I now have a course uploaded on GPS waiting for me to get to a very cool town! I'll post the ride after I successfully do it on the bike.
1 comment:
Hey Patria, this is Mark, in Denver. I don't know you and you don't know me, but I know I've seen you out at the races or on the trail at one time or another. I ran across your blog while looking at some other blogs of our Colorado cycling friends. It sounds like you are having a great experience in Italy! I need to do something like you are doing! I'm also a "techie" (software developer).
Ok, so if I understand what you are wanting to do here, I think this might be of use to you:
http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/gmaptogpx/
This guy writes some more about it:
http://www.bevhoward.com/G2WPT.htm
Let me know if/how it works. I'm [this] close to getting a GPS.
Cheers and have fun!
-Mark
Post a Comment