OpenCycleRoute

Discuss

Frank — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:42:45 +0000

A while back I added a simple discussion forum for opencycleroute.org, based on cruciforum by Stuart Langridge.

Any opencycleroute questions or feature requests can be posed there. So go there immediately and liven the place up!

Technorati Tags: forum, cycle, route, cruciforum

The need for speed

Frank — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:36:05 +0000

I’ve added a new speed graph for GPX files that have timestamps. Currently this is in mph only, and is averaged over 20 second intervals. At some point I will probably add a preference for units (mph or kmph).

Technorati Tags: gpx, speed, cycle, route

Speed information

Frank — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:18:22 +0000

If your GPX file has timestamp information, opencycleroute will now calculate average speed, stopped time, and moving averages in both mph and kmph.

For the purposes of calculation you are considered ’stopped’ if the distance between one trackpoint and another is <1m.

Technorati Tags: gpx, timestamps, speed, cycle, route

Give us your f**cking money

Frank — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:38:52 +0000

On the weekend of 3 and 4 May 2008, I am cycling from Amsterdam to London to support Motor Neuron Disease reasearch, with a group of friends and colleagues. Please sponsor me!

You can read more background here, and below is an approximation of the route we will take (80km on day 1, and 130km on day 2).

(And - contrary to scurrilous rumour - I was not in Amsterdam and on the electric lettuce at the time I agreed to do this!)

Crap cycle lanes

Frank — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:01:30 +0000

LOL!…November “facility of the month” from the Warrington cycle campaign…now available as a book.

I love the smell of code in the morning

Frank — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 11:17:07 +0000

About a year ago I decided I wanted to create a cycle route site which was database backed and which allowed free sharing of cycle routes. There are a few sites similar to this already (e.g. Bikely, CTC maps), but they all have either limited coverage, they’re not free (as in speech, not free as in beer), or they have copyright issues.

The CTC site is a great site, very similar to what I wanted to create but it requires you to belong to the CTC in order to use the routes. The CTC is even a good organisation and I have used it in the past, and probably will join again, however why should I need to pay them if I want to share a route with them? CTC maps is neither free as in speech nor free as in beer.

Bikely is also quite nice and has a good following, but it derives its data from copyrighted (google) maps (rather than simply displaying the route on them) and it is a little vague as to who owns the resulting database. It is free as in beer but not free as in speech. Weirdly, it’s also not very cyclist oriented. I’m really not interested in following a google maps turn by turn animation on my laptop when I’m cycling up a hill in the pouring rain. I want to be able to print that route off and take it on my bike!

But anyway, I’m just not interested in riding for miles and hours and then have somebody else own the fruits of my work…hence opencycleroute.org. (If you’re a cyclist, then please sign up and submit routes!…if you’re a coder or a web designer, then go get the source and hack on it)

So now about a year later I have started to write the application and I have something usable. It must be about three years since I wrote any code, and this is also the first time I’ve ever gone near a SQL database of my own volition. Thank god for Ruby on Rails is all I can say. Very impressed with this framework, which has allowed me to knock an initial version of opencycleroute.org together in spare time over the space of a few weeks (though I suspect the security of the resulting application is pants - acts_as_authenticated, in particular, is an overcomplicated load of bollocks).

technorati tags:cycling, code, ruby, rails, opencycleroute

Opencycleroute.org source code now available

Frank — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:40:33 +0000

You can now get the source code for the opencycleroute.org Rails app using subversion. Details are here.

Please feel free to hack on the code and suggest patches and improvements. Also, as you can see, we could use some web design help

technorati tags:rails, cycle, routes, source, affero, gpl

Cycle routes on rails!

Frank — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 15:10:47 +0000

OK, so this is not exactly polished but the basics are usable, so I may as well release it:

http://www.opencycleroute.org:3000/

Please sign up and add some routes! Let me know if you find any bugs.

I will be adding more features like tagging, search, turn-by-turn route instructions and other goodies as and when I get the time. The code will also be made available if you are a coder or web designer and would like to help.

technorati tags:opencycleroute, cycle, routes, rails

Still here :-)

Frank — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:10:33 +0000

I haven’t updated this in a while, but the project is still here. I’ve been working on a web application to make uploading gpx files and mapping routes easier.

The code is ruby on rails, and so far I have:

GPX file processing (extracting waypoints and trackpoints, etc)
Route Mapping
Automatic computation of elevation and thumbnail graphics
Basic photo support
Basic user management

Here is a little example:

Google maps is illustrated, however as this is based on mapstraction it should work on Yahoo maps, Microsoft virtual earth, and even openstreetmap. Although, annoyingly the openstreetmap support in the version of mapstraction I have doesn’t seem to work yet (and this was the reason I used mapstraction in the first place….grrr).

Code will be freely available shortly. Please contact me if you would like to help with development and/or a limited beta test when this is ready for use in anger. Just drop me a line at fod at opencycleroute dot org

technorati tags:mapstraction, openstreetmap, cycle, routes, rails, opencycleroute

GPSTagr: geotag flickr photos using GPS

Frank — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 08:16:32 +0000

GPSTagr is an excellent web-based utility which will geotag a bunch of flickr photographs based on a GPS tracklog. It uses the timestamps in the GPX file and matches them to the times your photographs were taken - very smart.

I just used this to geotag all my waypoint photographs for opencycleroute tracks in a couple of clicks, a task I’d been putting off for months because doing it manually (approx 100 photos) would have been inutterably tedious.

Another nice thing about this is because it uses your GPS data, and not copyrighted maps, there are no copyright issues.

technorati tags:geodata, geotag, flickr, gps, gpx