Google Earth GPS Tracking Solution - Page 10

RPM_VR4 · 02-02-2006, 03:13 AM

Nice job Merc. You are getting a good interface going. One thing I would definatly need is a lot of different zoom-levels. "route view | play route | car view" is a great start. I also need one for "traffic-overlay view", "car-zoomed-in", "car-zoom-medium", "car-zoom-out". Also a "destination zoomed-in".

spaceskater · 02-02-2006, 05:46 AM

Great work mercury7! Skins are looking very nice! I have been playing around with both nmeaGE and Earth Bridge tha last few days and found out that Earth Bridge has a big abvantage for me at least, the 1 second refresh rate! It trakse you much smoother and stays close to yous real position. Other that that I must admit that the program is still very bugy but promesing! I've been talking the the guy that made it he is really tring to make it better. I will be beta testing for him.

MotoDude: Is it posible to make the refresh rate of nmeaGE 1 instead of 4??

crazysteve2k · 02-02-2006, 01:05 PM

Great looking skin, will you be shareing you hard work

Steve

RPM_VR4 · 02-02-2006, 02:50 PM

um... nmeaGE defaults to 2 second and you can easily change it to 1 second in the config.

EarthBridge is great. I love the path mark. It really needs:
1) Change of ICON (so you can put a pic of your car)
2) Hot-Keys so I can make SKINbedder control it.
3) A hot-key to dissable the network refresh so I can dissable it when showing directions, traffic, and other non-GPS centered views.

If you know the guy making EarthBridge, send him to this forum. Maybe we can all work together to get a real NAV solution using GE.

Zip-Lock · 02-02-2006, 03:04 PM

I've been using EarthBridge. It’s great but I have two I've had issues with it so far:

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.
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.

DylanBennett · 02-02-2006, 03:05 PM

Hi. I'm the guy making Earth Bridge.

First off, great forum you all have here. I've been reading through the threads and I'm really impressed with the density of useful info. Very good stuff.

Second, I'm glad some of you have been enjoying the program, and thanks for the patience with bugs and so forth. I've gotten excellent debugging help and feedback directly from at least two users on this forum. I really appreciate it and I look forward to more.

Finally, I'll give you a bit of info on what I'm focusing on at the moment with Earth Bridge.

1) Solid and stable connection code, specifically in regard to handling hibernate/unhibernate and gracefully resuming dropped connections.

2) Remote control feature.

3) Hot-keys. (I realize how important this feature is to all of you after having read a number of the threads on this forum.)

4) Live GPS status display in GE itself as an overlay in the corner. (I'm very excited about this feature.)

Those are the main four things I am currently focusing on. Of course I'm still working on all the other features I want in order to get out of beta, like choosing placemark icons and so forth, but the above are the ones on my list to get handled right away.

Feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like test releases in between the public releases. I'm always happy to have more testers.

Zip-Lock · 02-02-2006, 03:15 PM

Quote: 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!

DylanBennett · 02-02-2006, 04:30 PM

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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.

mercury7 · 02-02-2006, 05:54 PM

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.

Zip-Lock · 02-02-2006, 09:59 PM

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.

RPM_VR4 · 02-03-2006, 03:56 AM

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!

supbro · 02-04-2006, 09:22 PM

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/

RPM_VR4 · 02-05-2006, 12:51 AM

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.

RPM_VR4 · 02-05-2006, 03:33 AM

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.

mercury7 · 02-05-2006, 03:09 PM

@ 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.