danpat

It's mostly a question of storage.

Here's a great tool for getting a feel:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...

Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.

You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.

Reminds me of the classic:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The_Best-est_Version_Control...

I'd look seriously at the TRAFx counters I referred to in my other comment. They'll do exactly what you want, they're used to count backcountry skiers by quite a few organizations, they work great in winter down to at least -40C.

There are some non-trivial design problems that need to be overcome in outdoor environments. The ultrasonic sensor may not be a good choice for winter counting, frost buildup on the sensor surface will likely greatly affect performance, plus it's a bit of a power hog.

Don't forget that battery capacity/max current can be greatly affected by cold temperatures as well.

Nice project, and will probably work great for short-term studies, but you'll want to improve the battery life and work hard on weatherproofing if it's to be used in the field for anything other than temporary projects.

I used to work for a company (http://www.trafx.net/) that specialized in making a device just like this, but using a passive infrared sensor instead of the ultrasonic sensor. The number one field problem is moisture damage to the electronics. Condensation, UV failure of seals, ice expansion through seals, etc. The list goes on. Based on the moss on the trees in the photo, it looks like a pretty wet environment, so you'll want to double-triple-quadruple seal that case and sensors before you think about leaving it outside for more than a month or two.

For comparison, we had some customers that had had our units in continuous use for nearly 10 years. Battery life on 3xAA alkaline was about 60 months using the IR sensor. The Arduino+ultrasonic sensor is a pretty power hungry combination for a battery-operated unit that might need to operate for extended periods. 5 days is a pretty short study period, a lot of the useful statistics that land management organizations want to see will span multiple years.

Put yourself in their shoes though. The people at the top don't really understand security, other than the vague "only the right people should have access to stuff" requirement.

I think the problem is that the people in charge of making decisions are gun-shy. Because of their inability to properly evaluate the security itself, it's also very difficult for them to properly evaluate people telling them what the security system should look like, and they've been burned by bad decisions in the past, so they take the "lalalala do nothing" approach and hope for the best. From their point of view, it's a perfectly reasonable approach to the problem.

I assume that someone has done an analysis of how the sensors will interact when there are many self-driving cars on the road?

Because many of the primary sensors are active (radar, lidar), will they work when they're surrounded by 50 other cars also blasting out the same signals?

I don't understand why the detractors don't understand this. Many people (including some commenters here) seem to think that the technology is useless unless it can handle all possible situations.

Auto-drive on long highway sections would be an amazing improvement by itself and prevent all kinds of fatigue related accidents. The cars could just announce ("Driver, take control") as they exit the highway system.

Hell, trucking companies could just have drivers waiting at highway exits to do the last-mile driving, the long-haul sections of trucking wouldn't require a person on-board.

I don't think it would be unfeasible to install beacons designed to aid driverless vehicles either, especially on highways where things don't change very quickly. Simple posts with machine-readable signalling (visual/radio/whatever). Most signage is designed for human recognition, but I bet it wouldn't be impossible/terribly expensive to install signage designed for automated driving.

Good point, that totally kills the economics of this project.

Perhaps I should've said "wristwatch formfactor", you're right, battery performance would not approach cheap digital watch, not by a long shot. But at at 120mW, you'd be able to get a few hours out of it with a CR2032 cell, which is better than useless. Garmin made GPS wrist units that up until recently have done no better than this, although admittedly, there's probably more utility in having a GPS on your wrist than an atomic clock.

Your could write "HOURS AND HOURS OF BATTERY LIFE!!" on the packaging.

Datasheet here:

http://www.chronos.co.uk/files/pdfs/sym/sa.45s.pdf

120mW, 3.3V? Totally doable as a wristwatch.

I would highly recommend watching that Moments of Wonder mini documentary, it will go some way towards answering your question.

That's easy: customers! Everything else is secondary really.

The demand is artificially inflated by the ready availability of loan money.

Many loans cannot legally be denied. This removes what otherwise would be a barrier to frivolous spending.

The devices are pretty easy to install, 3 wires (power, ignition, ground). Because this is heavy equipment, there's usually a mechanic somewhere nearby that can handle at least that.

I also make a version of the tracker that I pack inside a Pelican case and expose a cigarette lighter plug, for use on snowmobiles. Most people can handle plugging that in, no instructions required.

My local ski area has a couple of machines that they let me crawl through, so I take lots of photos of the important parts of the installation process, best places to place antennas, etc, and put them in an "install guide" PDF that I print and include in any shipments I send. I also wrote up a "how to test/verify that the unit is working" guide, and ask people to go through that before contacting me for troubleshooting. If they call, I ask if they've gone through the test/verify guide. If they haven't, I tell them to do that, then call back if it's still not working.

So far, so good.

Use Proj.4:

http://trac.osgeo.org/proj/wiki/man_proj

or, just take a raster image (PNG) and warp it:

http://www.gdal.org/gdalwarp.html

The income from this website isn't strongly correlated to it's global web ranking.

Ski areas pay me to generate trail reports, and either link to the "default" report I publish for each area, or they publish the reports on their own websites. Reports are also printed and pinned up in lodges, or emailed by marketing departments to subscribed skiers. I'm not depending on people visiting my site for revenue.

What you have to realize is that people aren't out there searching for "gps grooming reports" (although I think I do pretty well in the search results for that phrase now). A this stage, they don't even know it exists. The sales channels that have worked so far are: word-of-mouth (it's a tiny industry where everyone knows everyone), personal introductions and a few cold-calls when I can summon the courage, and I don't expect that to change significantly.

This is the first "season" that I've worked on it full time and I've almost hit minimum wage. I expect to do better than that next winter. I have a decent runway, live very cheaply and don't have billion-dollar ambitions. I've supplemented the revenue with a little bit of side-consulting, but not a lot.

The site is focussed mainly on the consumer, the skiers, for whom the service is free (they just look at the maps).

The "customers" are ski area managers, they pay me to publish their maps and generate their trail reports.

The sign-up process is slightly obtuse on purpose. Because I'm still busy developing the site, only the really motivated customers actually contact me (via the "Contact" page), so I don't have to spend too much time doing a sales pitch that goes nowhere. I'm fortunate that I have a decent runway to play with.

I'll change that a bit this summer once I'm no longer frantically building out features.

There is effort required on my part for each sign-up, mostly around cleaning up GIS data that new customers supply, although I do supply a backend with tools for map management. The ski area managers are often extremely non-technical, and like the personal touch. I charge a modest premium for that.

The MVSTA did contact me back in November, but I guess they decided against it for the time being. Feel free to lobby them :-)

A couple of areas are funding their subscription by getting a local ski shop to pay for the service. There's a huge range of budgets across the industry, it's been tricky figuring out pricing that works for everyone.

I don't charge the public. Ski areas pay me a yearly fee to publish their reports. I handle all the data processing, generating maps, keeping servers up and running, mobile device provisioning, equipment testing, warranty, tech support, etc, etc.

There are a couple of areas that have tried to DIY, with limited success, they usually simply don't have the technical knowledge on staff. I've been surprised myself at the breadth of technical turf I've had to cover to create something that works reliably and simply. For a reasonably technical software engineer with a bit of hardware experience, it's not a big deal, but for everyone else, it's too complex a problem.

One of the really interesting problems I had to solve was reliably figuring out which trail the grooming equipment was traversing. Unlike roadways, the GPS data for the trails is typically either non-existent, inaccurate or just plain wrong. Cleaning that up is a bit of effort for each ski area. In addition, ski trails are often in much closer proximity than roadways, which combined with GPS error margins, means that I had to do some fairly gnarly stuff to avoid jumping between nearby trails constantly. It looks simple enough on the surface, but it required some real hair-pulling to get working reliably.

Contract negotiations with cell-network providers weren't much fun either. Many ski areas are in pretty marginal cell-network coverage regions, so finding devices that behaved well in that environment was critical (in addition to handling very cold weather, i.e. -40F for 8 hour stretches). The grooming staff are typically completely non-technical, working weird shift hours, etc, so the system has to be completely hands-off after installation. Finding a device that would do that, handle the harsh environment and be properly certified to operate on the north american mobile networks was no easy task.

I created:

http://skitrails.info/

I'm an avid cross-country skier, and traditionally daily trail reports are done by hand by the maintenance staff after they're out all night working on the trails.

I had the bright idea of putting GPS tracking devices in grooming equipment and creating the "what's been groomed" report automatically, in real-time.

It took about 4 seasons to really get it right, and there was no appreciable income for that period. Lots of lessons learned about equipment (antennas, good wiring practices in vehicles, power cleanliness in big equipment, etc), good ways to present the data, map projections, how to deal with messy data, dealing with non-technical users, cross-border shipping tarrifs, mobile-network provisioning rules, the list goes on. I did it alongside my full-time job for the first 4 years.

It's a tiny niche, and one I never expect to get all that big, but it looks like I'll be able to make it my sole income source next season.

Which is great, because it'll let me go skiing more.

Export restrictions have been in place for a very long time.

Another relatively well-known distributor that got bitten is McMaster-Carr, a mechanical parts supplier (with a very nice web design - http://mcmaster.com/).

After shipping something to a location they shouldn't have, they were penalized in 2003 and they no longer ship outside the US. Which is a damn shame, because they have a great catalogue of stuff that's very easy to navigate.

> Programming is a wild card - you can play it to improve any hand you have.

This is the truth. Every success I've had has been where I've applied my computing skills to an environment where no-one with those skills had yet appeared. The efficiency gains you can make to mundane, non-computing tasks by applying a bit of programming knowledge will often knock the socks off people who've been doing things the same old way for years.

Reminds me of this:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The_Best-est_Version_Control...

Craigslist?

Here's one:

http://www.royaltek.com/index.php/rgm-3600

There are dozens of variants, some with USB, some with RS232, some with bluetooth. "Mouse" is common nomenclature for this kind of device, I don't know why.

Basically, they all deliver continuous NMEA data over a serial line.

Modern, fancy nuclear devices, perhaps.

But I suspect that the machining to make something that goes boom is probably well within the means of a traditional machine shop.

I think the parent is objecting to where US courts have decided that their jurisdiction ends.

Which always makes me think of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfWfJz59pk&t=1m33s

For buddhists, not killing is mostly axiomatic, based on the Five Precepts. The mental gymnastics that guy was undertaking trying to reconcile that axiom with other dogma that would otherwise allow killing was quite impressive.

That's the problem with axioms.

This has been my experience almost exactly (s/Yukon/Alberta/). I now hunt yearly and basically don't any meat that I didn't kill myself. One deer is enough for a couple for a year.

I found the experience it very self-illuminating, the hypocrisy of will-not-kill-but-will-eat-from-store became much more focused.

The experience of hunting wildly varies. I've had one or two gut-wrenching bad shots, hitting the animal in the leg then having to track it down and end it. Most of the time, the animal is dead before the sound of the shot reaches them, before which they were blissfully grazing.

Regardless of the experience, you reflect on what you've just done far more than when you buy meat on a shelf.

Small backstory and a question for you.

My fiancée is a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Recently, we were having dinner with a few of her colleagues, and they were complaining about the overwhelming number of new medications coming to market, and how they could never remember all the interactions, what to use for what, which ones were new, which had been retired, etc, etc.

As a CS person, I piped up and suggested, tongue in cheek, that the computers were going to take their jobs. This led to a healthy discussion about the human practitioners role in a time when the amount of information they're expected to know is rapidly expanding.

What's your take in the future role of the human in diagnosing and prescribing in a situation like this?