Comments on: In-car GPS + Palm = DIY photo tracker

By: Marco

Marco — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:49:04 +0000

I agree, it has a good battery life.
The main drawback was finding all the programs to make the setup work.
Especially since I am using mac.
I was also thinking of getting a dedicated photo tracker, but then decided to go for this all in one solution, that allows my girlfriend to watch movies during the return trip on the train.
Ciao
Marco

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:41:55 +0000

3 hours 'till half battery is not bad Marco (allowing for half-day hikes); unlike my solution you are not relying on Bluetooth being active for connectivity, so the drain on the battery may be less (although it is of course powering the GPS receiver, which is not the case with my Palm).

As for the theory that devices designed for in-car navigation might be less accurate than dedicated photo trackers, don't believe it: I compared my old Navman to my new Holux and the Navman was the more accurate!

By: Marco

Marco — Sun, 04 May 2008 14:42:10 +0000

Well my girlfriend went around Ise city in Mie prefecture with the gps going for about 3 hours continuos use and still had more than half of the battery available.
I have just reformatted the HP Travel Companion to make a clean reinstall (last one was more than 6 months ago), if you want I can test it around the city and send you a gpx log file. Just for the fun of it.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:00:46 +0000

@Marco: Seems like a fine solution, since you only need the one device and can move the GPX file to the Mac for processing. What sort of battery life do you get? Just curious!

By: Marco

Marco — Sat, 03 May 2008 04:24:39 +0000

Hello,
I have been using a HP Travel companion with built in GPS receiver.
I record the tracks using simple program called GPXlogger. It has been written for the MIO GPS enabled PDA but works fine on the HP Travel companion. Here is a link to the download page. It is all in Japanese, but should be pretty easy to download the file. Be careful that you need to also install .Net Compact Framework 2.0!!!

I am also using a mac, so after I save the .gpx file, I then copy them to my mac and then geotag the pictures using gpsphotolinker.

here is an example. Sorry if it is in Italian!!!

Hope it helps
Ciao
Marco

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:13:09 +0000

Not good

But sadly typical. I e-mailed Holux UK a couple of weeks ago and was ignored, and this has been my pre-purchasing experience with numerous other companies. Most of the world doesn't understand the concept of customer service, as I understand it to be practiced in the US (although I'm sure there are exceptions there too).

By: icerabbit

icerabbit — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:14:37 +0000

A week has gone by and ATP Sales has not replied to my request for some additional info on their product. Not good. Reviews aren't as positive as I had hoped. v1 growing pains?

By: icerabbit

icerabbit — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:44:17 +0000

Thx Bruce. I was aware of the black background issue. Just wasn't sure why it is be missing today, coincidentally on your blog. Did have a brief posting issue too, when I tried to reply a second time. No idea what that was about. Will email you the screenshot.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:30:11 +0000

Gravatar have screwed up icerabit, with black background JPEGs replacing alpha-transparent PNGs. Apparently they didn't appreciate that PNG is an image format. Gravatars are cached on this site, so changes @ Gravatar may be time-delayed here.

By: icerabbit

icerabbit — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:19:36 +0000

(my gravatar is missing?)

PS: on the CF card & ATP photofinder. Maybe it will work using a USB card dongle, as it does on the flyer say they're compatible with compact flash 4 and there's an image in step 4 that lists card reader among ms sd mmc dsc.

That syncing without computer could be really sweet. Grab the cards from the cameras and sync away.