Tuesday, November 10, 2020

A better view on GPS logs in SMASH

It is a while now that I am collecting gps logs done by car and bike to get a better idea on how to "correct" a bit jumping points. This is how the Kalman filter was added to the GPS points pipeline as additional information of choice (not always you want the corrected information).

As usual, when working on stuff, you need to get a better view over things, which usually means also to get a qualitative idea of what is going on. This is how we got to gradient coloring of the gps lines.

The result is actually quite cool and gives a good insight of what happened and when. So we decided that this will enter the next release of SMASH.

How does it work?

The GPS log properties panel now has an additional combobox that permits the selection of a color palette for a particular information.



If a palette is selected it overrides the solid color of the log, applying the palette to the line.

The result in the case of elevation is something like:


Which gives a pretty good idea about where the peak is. Also, assuming the temporal direction of the log, the downhill parts of the log are drawn with dotted border.

You might want to know where the steep parts are, right? That is what slope can help you in:

A maybe less interesting vision is the one colored by speed:

And last but not least, it is possible to view the log by its accuracy. This can be quite interesting for surveyors, if they decide to pair to the survey a complete log, which will then tell them where accuracy was better. Obviously in the below map it is simple to see where the galleries are:


I find this view of the GPS logs quite intriguing. Some might say that it would be better to have this information before a trip... and they are right. Which is why we added this coloring option also to gpx data layers. If the gpx contain the elevation information, then the elevation and slope palette are available:


I hope you'll also enjoy it... in the next release :-)



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