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Caches Along A Route


Jeremy

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Thanks Jeremy. I presently do that with Several PQ's (many waypoints) and use an 'ARC' filter. But this will whittle down many PQ's down to a manageable few that I'll actually travel by. And hopefully put less burden on your system from it from producing fewer PQ's.

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Ok, I need some GPX's to test with.

 

Here are the requirements.

 

GPX must be 1.1

Must have Tracks or Routes, not just WPT's

Must be interesting :D

 

Visit my profile page and email me with your GPX

 

Please limit a total of 3 submissions per person.

 

Top 3 routes will get something special from me.

 

-Raine

Edited by raine
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Ok, I need some GPX's to test with.

 

Here are the requirements.

 

GPX must be 1.1

Must have Tracks or Routes, not just WPT's

Must be interesting :D

 

Please limit a total of 3 submissions per person.

 

Top 3 routes will get something special from me.

 

-Raine

On the way.....

Edited by StarBrand
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I wish I wasn't technically challenged!! Most of my bookmarks are public & my Cascade Loop & Olympic Loop bookmarks are on routes, but I didn't have the routes "tracked". I did it the hard way. Wish I knew just what Raine was asking for...I wanted to be in on the fun!!

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I wish I wasn't technically challenged!! Most of my bookmarks are public & my Cascade Loop & Olympic Loop bookmarks are on routes, but I didn't have the routes "tracked". I did it the hard way. Wish I knew just what Raine was asking for...I wanted to be in on the fun!!

 

There are some tricks for the technically challenged that can make it pretty straightforward to build a route using some free tools. I'm sure once this goes public someone will put together a good tutorial on how to do it. Or worst case, since you can share routes, someone can create the route for you. I'm sure there's a nice lady or gent in here who would be willing to oblige such a request.

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Heh. Thanks folks for sending in the routes. I've been looking over Raine's shoulder and, holy cow! An 815 mile route? Another route with 6,000 points? Jeepers. I'm glad we're testing it first :)

 

Based on these tests we'll have to reduce the points to 1,000 or less, and keep the distance under 1,000 miles and 5 miles along the route. Fortunately with some great tools like GPSBabel you can easily simplify your route so it fits within the number of points allowed. Breaking your trip out into several routes will fix the distance issue as well.

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Also, the idea is basically that you can create a route with turn by turn directions in Google Earth, save it as a KML, convert it to GPX (and reduce the number of points) in GPSBabel, and upload it to Geocaching.com to have the Pocket Query Generator search along that route. Reducing the number of steps from KML -> routes that Geocaching.com can use will probably be forthcoming as well. Too bad Google Earth isn't built for plugins.

Edited by Jeremy
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I wish I wasn't technically challenged!! Most of my bookmarks are public & my Cascade Loop & Olympic Loop bookmarks are on routes, but I didn't have the routes "tracked". I did it the hard way. Wish I knew just what Raine was asking for...I wanted to be in on the fun!!

 

................... I'm sure there's a nice lady or gent in here who would be willing to oblige such a request.

 

I am flying in to Portland around July 14, try to attend Champoeg 2006 - C5, then on to the Original Stash, from there up to Seattle to look for the mythical archived Headquarters Cache, would love to have that route figured out by one of those nice ladies or gents in here!!!!

From there we are driving our way back to Mississippi, via 12 states!!! Caching all the way, have not yet figured our final route yet, planning on staying on two lane roads and seeing the sights, will need that route also!!!

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I'd quit following this thread, but if we're ready to talk bits and bytes, I'll wake up.

 

I sent Raine cases *intended* to stress things based on my experience both as the GPSBabel guy and as how people really want to use that. But the examples are real. People actually do take road trips of hundreds of miles and it takes a positively crazy number of PQs to do local filtering just to get the ones at the Cracker Barrels you may be stopping at. People actually do multi-segment hops. People will use software that gives you points every 20 feet and wno't know how to simplify them. I figured I'd share those joys with you NOW before you were DOS-ed by the first user to stress things. :-)

 

I'd encourage you to front end the whole thing with GPSBabel. Let it accept GPX 1.0, GPX 1.0, Streets & Trips, Mapsource, Mapsend, Google Earth KML, or darned near http://www.gpsbabel.org/capabilities.html]anything else[/url], filter the number of points down to an computationally acceptable number, and then hand you consistently formatted data so you have only "safe" input to deal with. (It won't do that now, but I could be bribed to add an option to discard tracks/routes over N total distance, too.) Let it "cleanse" the routes before they're exposed to the new Raine thing. You'll be given sequenced routes in a consistent format, ready to feed to your XML parser.

 

Even if you don't use GPSBabel for the actual "stuff nearest this polyline" lifting, using it as a front-end filter to purify and simplify the wacky stuff you'll get from the Real World has some merit.

 

(I also expect that 1,000 points for the width of the paint brush you're likely to use will be computational overkill. If you'd like to pursue the science of that, drop me a line.)

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Also, the idea is basically that you can create a route with turn by turn directions in Google Earth, save it as a KML, convert it to GPX (and reduce the number of points) in GPSBabel, and upload it to Geocaching.com to have the Pocket Query Generator search along that route. Reducing the number of steps from KML -> routes that Geocaching.com can use will probably be forthcoming as well. Too bad Google Earth isn't built for plugins.

 

This worked great(I think, it worked in the fact that Raine didn't yell at me :)), it was pretty easy to export the KML and GPSBabel was easy to load the file in and filter(Thanks Robert!). It shouldn't be too difficult to write up a tutorial on this.

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I'd quit following this thread, but if we're ready to talk bits and bytes, I'll wake up.

 

I sent Raine cases *intended* to stress things based on my experience both as the GPSBabel guy and as how people really want to use that. But the examples are real. People actually do take road trips of hundreds of miles and it takes a positively crazy number of PQs to do local filtering just to get the ones at the Cracker Barrels you may be stopping at. People actually do multi-segment hops. People will use software that gives you points every 20 feet and wno't know how to simplify them. I figured I'd share those joys with you NOW before you were DOS-ed by the first user to stress things. :-)

 

I'd encourage you to front end the whole thing with GPSBabel. Let it accept GPX 1.0, GPX 1.0, Streets & Trips, Mapsource, Mapsend, Google Earth KML, or darned near http://www.gpsbabel.org/capabilities.html]anything else[/url], filter the number of points down to an computationally acceptable number, and then hand you consistently formatted data so you have only "safe" input to deal with. (It won't do that now, but I could be bribed to add an option to discard tracks/routes over N total distance, too.) Let it "cleanse" the routes before they're exposed to the new Raine thing. You'll be given sequenced routes in a consistent format, ready to feed to your XML parser.

 

Even if you don't use GPSBabel for the actual "stuff nearest this polyline" lifting, using it as a front-end filter to purify and simplify the wacky stuff you'll get from the Real World has some merit.

 

(I also expect that 1,000 points for the width of the paint brush you're likely to use will be computational overkill. If you'd like to pursue the science of that, drop me a line.)

 

I'll start the bribe...... I like the idea of a front end processor to take a raft of files as input. hmmmmm

 

And yes, I go on 1000 to 3000 mile trips in the car sometimes. Planning a 1900 mile trip later this month.

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I sent Raine cases *intended* to stress things based on my experience both as the GPSBabel guy and as how people really want to use that. But the examples are real.

 

...

 

I figured I'd share those joys with you NOW before you were DOS-ed by the first user to stress things. :-)

 

 

Yeah. I know. I expected this kind of thing, but it was still shocking to see it in action. It's definitely appreciated.

 

I'd encourage you to front end the whole thing with GPSBabel. Let it accept GPX 1.0, GPX 1.0, Streets & Trips, Mapsource, Mapsend, Google Earth KML, or darned near http://www.gpsbabel.org/capabilities.html]anything else[/url], filter the number of points down to an computationally acceptable number, and then hand you consistently formatted data so you have only "safe" input to deal with.

 

So I understand you, the idea is to only accept a certain type of data from the user? Or actually implementing gpsbabel on geocaching.com's end?

 

I expect most people would like a drag/drop gpx, and it creates a gpx to use with the site. The system can receive multiple route segments so cutting up a route would work too. Currently GPS Babel won't do merges unless there is date time data (so some assumption of sequential routes in a GPX would make that work too)

 

(It won't do that now, but I could be bribed to add an option to discard tracks/routes over N total distance, too.) Let it "cleanse" the routes before they're exposed to the new Raine thing. You'll be given sequenced routes in a consistent format, ready to feed to your XML parser.

 

Splitting routes into separate segments would be better than truncating them, which is what you say in sentence 2 anyway.

 

Even if you don't use GPSBabel for the actual "stuff nearest this polyline" lifting, using it as a front-end filter to purify and simplify the wacky stuff you'll get from the Real World has some merit.

 

Raine actually does this on the db end which can be pretty efficient. He can answer the more technical questions about this but it is less brute force than how GPSBabel does it.

 

(I also expect that 1,000 points for the width of the paint brush you're likely to use will be computational overkill. If you'd like to pursue the science of that, drop me a line.)

 

It actually isn't that bad but I agree that the number of points can be overkill.

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And yes, I go on 1000 to 3000 mile trips in the car sometimes. Planning a 1900 mile trip later this month.

 

The 800+ mile trip returned less than 500 caches, so it is definitely possible to return a good number of caches along a route without going over the limit.

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I also gave Google KML from Earth as the first example since turn by turn directions can be saved as KML and works great for a geocacher who isn't familiar with the n number of applications out there. Having a drag&drop application that recognizes the file type and takes appropriate action would be a great feature to see what it would do with whatever file you submit.

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Yeah. I know. I expected this kind of thing, but it was still shocking to see it in action. It's definitely appreciated.

I've been on the other end of that stick. I, too, was shocked at the wacky things out there in the world.

 

So I understand you, the idea is to only accept a certain type of data from the user? Or actually implementing gpsbabel on geocaching.com's end?
The latter. In the code associated with the "upload this file" option, let it call GPSBabel to normalize/cleanse/purify/simplify the data. The user would have no knowledge that it's done between the time they upload it and the time your .net code actually sees any of it.
I expect most people would like a drag/drop gpx, and it creates a gpx to use with the site.
Many of your users have software that doesn't speak GPX, so I think accepting non-GPX input would simplify things for them
Currently GPS Babel won't do merges unless there is date time data
I'm open to changing that if it betters things for you.
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So I understand you, the idea is to only accept a certain type of data from the user? Or actually implementing gpsbabel on geocaching.com's end?
The latter. In the code associated with the "upload this file" option, let it call GPSBabel to normalize/cleanse/purify/simplify the data. The user would have no knowledge that it's done between the time they upload it and the time your .net code actually sees any of it.

 

I (or really Raine) would have to understand how to do that. I'm guessing that the submit will shell out to GPSBabel, pass the file, save it, then hand it back to the web process. Sounds tricky.

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I'm guessing that the submit will shell out to GPSBabel, pass the file, save it, then hand it back to the web process. Sounds tricky.

Nyaaah, in PHP at least, it's trivial. You can even do it via pipes to eliminate an extra file I/O if you like. It's totally syncronous, you get notification of errors, and so on. There's no rocket science at all.
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Just so folks know, robertlipe, raine and I have taken the technical conversation out of the forums. We'll get back to you guys when we sort something out.

 

That's a shame. It's very interesting for some of us that are out of your loop to see how a feature is massaged and tested before being turned loose on the site.

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Having a drag&drop application that recognizes the file type and takes appropriate action...

 

So the place where we drag our files to might be called the RaineDrop?

 

And maybe the feature we use to get caches along a route will be called Driving Raine?

 

To make sure the caches are within a certain distace from the trip, does it do a Raine Check?

 

I know those of us that have been looking forward to this feature, and are happy about it, are now doing a Raine Dance!

 

Just be sure to give a big bonus to Raine man!

 

... and I'm done.

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Having a drag&drop application that recognizes the file type and takes appropriate action...

 

So the place where we drag our files to might be called the RaineDrop?

 

And maybe the feature we use to get caches along a route will be called Driving Raine?

 

To make sure the caches are within a certain distace from the trip, does it do a Raine Check?

 

I know those of us that have been looking forward to this feature, and are happy about it, are now doing a Raine Dance!

 

Just be sure to give a big bonus to Raine man!

 

... and I'm done.

 

:):P

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Just a question as to how this will play out...

 

Will all of the other criteria be "applicable" to caches along a route as well?

 

In other words, I'm hoping that this will be an alternative to "From a point of origin" in a Pocket Query - so that I can still choose the terrain and difficulty, also types of caches as limiting criteria (even state if I wanted).

 

I would also have the ability to choose either 1) from a route that I "own" (I've uploaded under my account), 2) uploading a brand new route or 3) using an existing route in the system (if I know the unique code?).

 

I know the front end and the final use is usually the last thing to be put in place, but just making suggestions here.

 

 

Take a look at this mock-up...

fcaaf0a3-e3e0-46ca-ace2-8d6ce0f8424c.jpg

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GMaptoGPX bookmarklet. Basically you bookmark a "link" (actually JavaScript), get driving direction on Google Maps, then click the bookmark and it spits out a GPX of the route. It's much easier than the Google Earth .kml

 

I currently use it for arc filters in GSAK, but the output is a GPX (you can specify tracks, route, or waypoints), so it would work for what I think you are trying to do.

 

Also, (I don't have a link) somewhere else is a GMaps mashup that allows the user to click on the map to generate a route.

I think you can see where I'm getting at.

It would take a little bit of clever coding to combine the two, but it's technically feasible and the site just implemented Google Maps on all cache pages....

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Just so folks know, robertlipe, raine and I have taken the technical conversation out of the forums. We'll get back to you guys when we sort something out.

 

That's a shame. It's very interesting for some of us that are out of your loop to see how a feature is massaged and tested before being turned loose on the site.

I agree. Updates please.

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Raine moved away from using GPSBabel code for imports, so you aren't really missing anything. Instead, for version 1, we are going forward with KML and GPX 1.1 imports. Testing is going well.

 

ok, once this is up and going will it be something my technically challanged self will be able to do without a bunch of plug-ins. will i be able to select I20 from shreveport, la to atlanta, ga and specify only caches 1/2 mi off of I20. i make that drive frequently and would love this feature if it user friendly to someone who is doing good to make a regular pocket query.

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It should be pretty easy. Open Google Earth, Type your start and end location and get the directions from them. Save the directions as a KML file and then upload that KML file to us. Viola! Select the route, give a description and some keywords for other people to find it with and then create a pocket query..

 

-Raine

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Viola! Select the route, give a description and some keywords for other people to find it with and then create a pocket query..

I already know how to play the viola, but I worry whether this requirement might render the new feature inaccessible to a substantial portion of the geocaching community.

 

Violas rock!

 

Hey, seriously, thanks for your work and your progress reports. I hope this is ready for some of my summer roadtrips, and that this weekend's trip is the last one I have to plot out the old fashioned way.

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Raine moved away from using GPSBabel code for imports, so you aren't really missing anything. Instead, for version 1, we are going forward with KML and GPX 1.1 imports. Testing is going well.

 

ok, once this is up and going will it be something my technically challanged self will be able to do without a bunch of plug-ins. will i be able to select I20 from shreveport, la to atlanta, ga and specify only caches 1/2 mi off of I20. i make that drive frequently and would love this feature if it user friendly to someone who is doing good to make a regular pocket query.

 

For fun I created this route for you and had a pocket query sent to your email address. I made the route public so you can continue to use it in future pocket queries once this goes live.

 

I'm editing to add that I did a query for all caches 2 miles from the route and it returned less than 500.

Edited by Jeremy
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