Thread: Google Earth GPS Tracking Solution

Originally Posted by DylanBennett

Hi. I'm the guy making Earth Bridge.

I just sent you an email about 30 seconds ago. Good work, it's a sweet program!

1.) It doesn’t always recognize valid fix on from my GPS, a Garmin 35. I know my GPS has a fix but it isn't always detected, it gets the NMEA data just fine, must be some kind of weird parsing error. If I hit the "connect to gps device" and "disconnect" buttons about 10 times it will work.

Can you send me an e-mail with the NMEA log file from Earth Bridge of the data stream that's coming in? Looking at the NMEA data, I will probably be able to tell what it's doing wrong. And send what COM port settings are you using too, just in case.

2.) It is slow to zoom in on my location when first starting. I have mine set to view at 1000 feet, but it starts zoomed out to see the whole globe and it takes about 3-4 minutes to zoom in from that level all the way down to 1000 feet.

This is a problem with how Google Earth zooms in to a placemark. It's a combination of too quick of an update interval and not a fast enough "fly-to" speed in the GE options. If the update interval is very short, GE can only just start moving its view before it's halted on the update and has to start from a standstill again. When that is combined with a slow "fly-to" speed in the GE options, it means that in the very short interval between updates, it can only move its view a little bit at a time. (I hope that makes sense how I explained it.) The solution is to adjust the two settings (in EB and GE) until it works well for you.

All right! Glad to see you here, Dylan.

RPM, how about a "drop out" menu for the different zoom settings on car view? You'd hit the car button, and a little sub-menu would pop up for the zoom sizes. Then, we could do the same thing for the route options.

I also changed the look of the buttons a little. Now, the light source is a vertical line down the center of the screen. Not a big change, but the elements fit together better now.

@ crazysteve2k - when I get it to work, you'll have it.

I made two crude demo movies to show GE working in my car. I used GE in conjunction with Earth Bridge.

The first shows GE going down the highway:
http://www.mp3car.com/nat/GE_demo_highway.wmv

And the second short clip shows it in between 3D buildings in Washington DC at an intersection:
http://www.mp3car.com/nat/GE_3D_buildings.wmv

Pretty cool. Just needs a better front end.

Welcome Dylan. Thanks for joining us here on MP3Car.

The remote control is a good idea, but hot-keys combined with SKINbedder will allow a really great control of both Earth-Bridge and GE itself. This is the interface Merc is designing in the screen-shots above.

Changing the car icon to a picture of a car is something we all really like from nemaGE, so adding that to Earth-Bridge will definatly be a big plus.

Would it be possible to also save a log and then replay it anywhere from real-time to 10x in GE at home? That would be an awesome feature that would allow your program to replace GPS-Secure/WhereIsMyGPS as well.

Being able to overlay lots of info through GE rather than having to do it with SKINbedder would be awesome as well.

Keep up the great work!

EDIT: @Merc: Looks good. You keep up the great work too man. I can't wait to string this all together. GE in the car rocks!

I just saw this today on Engadget. It's a screnshot of the VW + Google in car navigation system that may or may not happen. It looks exceedingly familiar, I think they stole it from Mercury7!

http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/04/v...e-sat-imagery/

Very interesting!

I doubt Google will be selling an x86 build though. That's why we have to do it ourselves (and make it more feature rich than an OEM would be aloud to sell). It can be done with SKINbedder, or someone else could write a "GEmod". In either case I will help where I can.

I can't wait for a company (Google maybe) to release a true Google Earth NAV solution (that talks directly to the GEservers and probably pays a licence to Google) for a standard CarPC, but I think that still is still a year or more away.

Hey merc, can you post the PNG's for the left, right, and sub-menu graphics so I can start adding your graphics to my GE SKINbedder skin?

I vote for doing 800x600 stretched so it looks right on a 800x480 monitor . We can always change it to a non-stretched version later, but that does require re-doing the INI co-ordinates.

EDIT: Oh, and don't forget the all-buttons down images too.

@ supbro - Those thieves! Looks good, but like RPM said, we'll make sure ours is better.

@ RPM - The stretched images are attached. Let me know if the new icons for the route sub-menu look okay.