We are delighted to announce that OSM has received a donation of 68 GPS units. Thanks go to James Doughty of Diass who very kindly donated them.
In addition to the 68 GPS units, which are mainly Garmin Geko 201s, James also provided an assortment of batteries, battery chargers and cables. There’s a full inventory of everything we received here (google spreadsheet).
So now we have to decide how to make the best use of them. Obvious uses are mapping parties and the GPStogo scheme, but if anyone has other good ideas for ways that we could use them then we’d really like to hear about it.
Maybe some could also be given to the deparments of geography at universities in developing countries together with the request to use them for OpenStreetMap.
Many thanks to James for this donation!
Congratulations for the new equipment. It would probably help a lot.
How easy to use are they? Can they be given to a person without technical skills and tell them to press a buttom everytime he/she drive his/her taxi/delivery truck/bus?
Cheers
@juliocosta, they are mostly Garmin Geko 201’s which are consumer grade units, so they are pretty simple to operate. Anyone who can operate a cell-phone ought to be able to record tracklogs without any problem.
Getting the data from them into OSM does require some technical nous and a bit of time commitment to turn the tracklogs into roads and tag the names, but anyone can master it with a bit of studying of the information on the OSM web-site.
Thank you Etienne.
My questions originated in the idea of giving some of this devices to some taxi/truck/bus drivers for X days, telling them to press the Y button every time they start or finish a trip, and after the X days someone (the person in charge of those devices) pickup the devices and do the upload and editing work, charges the batteries, and take the devices back to the drivers.
It makes total sense to me to put data loggers in vehicles that are all day in the streets, specially if they do “random” routes (the taxis and trucks).
I’m involved with a group that will be driving trucks around Africa collecting soil samples for the next four years. They have six land rovers that could start collecting tracklogs right away.
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