I’m a gadget geek. I’ll admit it. And lately I’ve been doing some photography and enjoying the geotagging features of many of the photo sharing services. But one of the things I didn’t have was a way to automatically track where I was while shooting. But now I do. I purchased an AMOD AGL3080 and have started playing around with it.
But it’s not just for photography. Over at the blog 42 And Flying, Greg, also a student pilot, has used it to create some awesome views of where he has been flying. He uses a combination of the AGL3080, Google Earth, and GPS Visualizer to create the KMZ files Google Earth translates into his photos. Checkout a comment on Jayson’s blog for more details on the process Greg uses.
I haven’t flown with the AGL3080 yet, but I have used it to create a rough picture of my morning commute. I’ve been playing with a combination of GPSBabel, which translates the GPS sentences in the AGL3080’s logfiles into KML, which Google Maps will read as an overlay.
The AGL3080 couldn’t be easier to use. Pop in 3AAA batteries, power it on, set it near a window to get it’s satellite locks, and it begins logging. You can specify a few different logging options (1 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec) by a combination of button presses on the unit. But overall it’s a no-brainer to get the unit logging. Retrieving the logfiles is easy, as the unit mounts like a flash drive on Mac or XP. Just drag ‘n drop.
There is some included software to match up your photos with your logfiles, which is basically all done with the timestamp on the photo and the timestamp in the logfile. When the software matches the two, it’ll update the EXIF tag on the photograph with the lat/long data.
So, with any luck, I’ll be flying on Saturday and may just have some fun graphics as a result…