The Strawberry Project

A tweet from Jim Phelps put me on to the Gmap Pedometer, which I’ve been having a quick play with this evening.

The service provides a means of being able to pre-record a route that can be exported to a gpx route in the same way I’ve shown previously. Rather than use Google’s directions service to be able to describe a route, you can simply ‘draw’ it on the Gmap Pedometer service and then export that out for use on your Garmin as before.  Now that’s more like it - as provided the high-res imagery is available in satellite view, you should be able to record off-road routes without too much trouble.

A word of caution though.  The registration/positional accuracy of the Google data coupled with the accuracy of your GPS unit at any given time may well lead to some pretty large error in positioning.  Pretty large meaning, don’t plot any knife-edge routes and expect to be able to follow them blindfolded wihtout mishap.  You have been warned!

Tags: Cycling, edge, garmin, gmap, gps, route, trace

As you may recall, I’ve been using a Garmin EDGE 205 since Christmas to keep track of the miles I’ve been covering on the bikes. The unit itself is pretty impressive for the cost (well, at least the cost from EBay), but for Mac users the software supplied by Garmin is pretty crap to say the least.

Kike has asked how he can get Google Earth route data out to the unit so he can design some new rides. Now what I’m going to explain here is similar, but is using what’s available for Google MAPS rather than Earth, as it’s generally simpler.

Now remember, this post is aimed at Mac users primarily - but I imagine that it’s the same deal for Windows and Linux users too - it’s just that I don’t have time to check them all out for you. If you’re a curious Windows or Linux user, just go and play - you shouldn’t be able to do any harm

Free Software Required:

GMAPtoGPX - you need to follow the instructions on the site to drag a bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. This is used from Google Maps to convert your route data to GPX format

GPSBabel

You will need to install GPSBabel to your Mac as we will be using this to upload Route data directly to your Garmin EDGE unit.

Once these are installed, we’re ready to go make some interesting routes.

Plug in your Garmin to an available USB port and turn it on, then follow the action on the video.

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One caveat with this approach is that every stage of the directions from Google is treated as a separate route. I’ll come back to editing the GPX into a single route in another post. I guess one other thing is that this is no good if you want to actually digitise a route from the map base - particularly if it’s for MTB use.

Tags: Cycling, edge, garmin, google-maps, gpx, OS X, routes