Formatted data output, getting there!

Over the last while I cleaned up and restructured some of the code, which took ages, hit so many weird problems with PL/PSQL, and the error reporting is not very great - it has taken me upwards of an hour to spot some mistakes! So slow progress.

Now the code is pretty much ready to be used with a trigger when a new data is uploaded, I have done GPS segments to locations mapping now too (if a new location is found, it is added to the location list). The way I'm doing this is by getting the average of all the coordinates within that segment which have more than 3 satellites, and then trying to match this average coordinate to a previously detected location which is within 200meters, the only problem is that sometimes the average of coordinates is not accurate enough to detect the location accurately. Will have to work on this more.

Formated output, Finally!

Messed around with outputting some HTML of the analyzed data.
Formated results are available here. (GPS coordinates are slightly changed so I don't give out where I live on the internet...). To match DCU, the average coordinate must be within 800meters from the centre, and for home I made it slightly smaller, due to the high freaquancy of the locations visited and creating lots of locations within, especially with DCU and to reduce some errors.

Now some of the more interesting data I have collected which is not me doing Home -> DCU -> Home:

2008-03-14

segment	Start	End	From	To	Location
83	07:40:17	07:53:41	31141	31186	ID-2 name Home
84	07:53:52	08:32:41	31187	31318	travel
85	08:32:41	13:12:50	31319	32216	ID-1 name DCU

Typical day, leaving my house slightly early to make it for 9am Real-Time Embedded lecture, GPS must have run out of battery or the Nokia device must have reset it self, both are fairly typical.

The "From" and "To" are foreign data base keys to the original GPS data.

2008-03-01

segment	Start	End	From	To	Location
76	21:36:55	21:37:44	29789	29792	travel
77	21:37:57	21:46:18	29793	29820	ID-2 name Home
78	21:46:30	22:25:34	29821	29933	travel
79	22:25:47	23:59:55	29934	30204	ID-16 name Merrion Square

Turning the device on fairly late, driving in to town, parking my car near Merrion Square to go to a friends birthday party, GPS device and Nokia tablet left in the car.

2008-03-02

segment	Start	End	From	To	Location
80	00:01:07	02:20:37	30207	30612	ID-16 name Merrion Square
81	02:20:49	03:31:04	30613	30826	travel
82	03:31:16	05:00:24	30827	31138	ID-2 name Home

New day, There till around 2:20, and then leaving for home... GPS running until battery runs out at 5am. Did not detect me giving a lift to friends besides DCU, where I stopped by for less than 5 min, neither it detected my filling up petrol. But these type of segments are very minute and not really considered significant.

2008-02-11

segment	Start	End	From	To	Location
62	09:10:05	09:11:13	25709	25712	ID-2 name Home
63	09:12:01	09:39:52	25713	25800	travel
64	09:40:15	12:33:13	25801	26325	ID-1 name DCU
65	12:33:46	12:43:02	26326	26354	travel
66	12:43:25	13:10:47	26355	26442	ID-13 name Clontarf Dart Station
67	13:12:22	13:23:50	26443	26470	travel
68	13:24:02	21:05:07	26471	27825	ID-18 name unknown

This is slightly more interesting as there is more activity in here.
Leaving home, parking up my car in the estate besides DCU, driving to clontarf dart station, leaving the GPS in my car, going for orthodontist appointment and driving back to DCU. The last area is a bug in data normalization which I have to take a look at.

2008-02-08

segment	Start	End	From	To	Location
58	16:52:52	20:58:09	24442	25153	ID-1 name DCU
59	20:58:22	21:10:29	25154	25199	travel
60	21:10:42	23:12:10	25200	25579	ID-12 name Friends party
61	23:12:32	23:49:57	25580	25706	travel

Interesting too, turning on the device in DCU, small travel period up close by to Griffth avenue, dropping down to a friends party for 2 hours and then driving back home, except during the traveling, GPS device ran out of battery, which lasts around 7 hours!

So I'm fairly happy with the output, besides the way I'm matching average GPS coordinate to an existing location... I'll have to find a better way of doing this if I have time... and need to hunt down the bug 2008-02-11.

Data collection problems

As previously mentioned, not getting time to charge the Bluetooth GPS device is a problem and only around 7 hours of data is collected when I don't get a chance to charge it.
I lost few days of data because there are times when GPS has not acquired signal after running out of battery, the time/date it reports is wrong... I had to delete around 2000 GPS coordinates because of this.

And me mainly being home mid December - February. I didn't realize I didn't collect so much data for February... Now I'm going try to collect data every day for the next few weeks.

Whats next

Fix the bug where I can't transfer the bluetooth logs to postgres database mentioned few months back, and start to think about how I'm going to let the user access this data nicely under Processing. And clean up a lot of things! So this basically is nearly the end of the 2nd stage of the project.

I'm having a meeting with my supervisor on Friday, so few new ideas might come in :). I'll try to post up the algorithm I'm using and a new revised Grant chart.