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If your digital camera has a SD slot, you may be able to use it for geotagging with the Wi-Fi SDIO Cards from Eye-Fi.

For about a hundred bucks you can add wireless capabilities to your current digital camera.

The magic behind the Eye-Fi SD cards is provided by the Atheros AR6001GL.

The AR6001GL combines a 2.4Ghz radio transceiver, the frequency range used for 802.11b/g wireless access points with upgradeable firmware.

The card carries 2Gbytes of Flash memory for your photos.

Insert one of the cards into your digital camera SD slot. By turning the camera on, the card will receive about 3.4 volts to start the bootstrap sequence.

By having software running on this SD card Eye-Fi makes it act in fact as an SDIO (Secure Digital Input Ouput) card, a bit smarter than plain storage.

“Activation/Setup”: Shake Well Before First Use

But before inserting it into the camera, you first need to activate the card and set known Wi-Fi locations with a list of the available SSID’s. (Supports static WEP 40/104/128, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK).

The cards should connect automatically to hotspots from the WayPort network. (First year service included with Explore, $19 a year afterwards, probably a typo).

The card then starts by talking to a running PC connected to the same access point (Eye-Fi Home, see below), or by uploading the photos to websites like Flickr or the storage services of your choice (Eye-Fi Share).

Geotagging

If you are talking to an access point, even better if you happen to have access to a database with matching location of SSID’s & MAC addresses of Wi-Fi hotspots, like the one Eye-Fi licensed from Skyhook Wireless.

Obviously we are talking about pictures taken somewhere close by and/or around a wi-fi spot. Yosemite or that deserted beach won’t quite make it.

Three Eye-Fi SD cards are being offered currently:

Home (~$80): uploads to computer,
Share (~$100): same plus uploads to web service,
Explore (~$130): same plus geotagging firmware marking your EXIF tags of your pictures with the corresponding Access Point latitute/longitude (and maybe altitude?).

DPreview tried the Eye-Fi Share SD card last November.

The Geotagging version (Explore) is the one announced this week.

Tags: Under the Hood, GeoTagging, Wireless by gpsguy
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Got a Helio Mysto? Try checking for movies at Fandango’s with MS TellMe. Works with GPS-equipped Blackberries too. (Via PC Mag and Washington Post)

iPhone users can try Geopedia. And new drop of the SDK posted during the week.

Ogleearth listed a series of sites that publish/map GPS tracks among them GPSies.

Curious about what’s inside a Garmin nuvi 750? Check EETimes “Under The Hood“.

Make pointing to a Open GPS Tracker:
http://www.opengpstracker.org/.

[BTW, Maker Faire is this weekend.]

Parallel Kingdom, GPS-based RPG game coming up for iPhone and Android phones.

Among the startup’s announced at Web 2.0 check the Location-based Social Network BrightKit and concept bekind Elkin (via Wired).

Lightpole shining its light along the week: VentureBeat, CNET

Nokia has a free beta geotagging software available for download: Location Tagger.

[Update] Second Galileo satellite launched.

Tags: LBS, Under the Hood, GeoTagging by gpsguy
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And may take you for a ride with them. The new phones are including geotagging software (N78) and true + assisted GPS, plus the upload/sharing site Ovi acquired with Twango and to make it all possible providing their own A-GPS backbone implementation.

By providing its own infrastructure for location data, applications running on Nokia phones can obtain accurate location data anywhere in the World, even US without depending on the carriers benevolence to get data from an actual device.

Meanwhile, Motorola joins a technical forum to push the Enhanched GPS standard from Cambridge, UK based educational research & private groups collaboration effort.

Recent work with a research lab from Berkeley, CA GPS-equipped Nokia phones were used to identify traffic patterns using phones as sensors.

The real problem about mobile implementation here is that US lacks and lags behind other countries and cultures that are currently leading the race. Japan has gadgets that Americans can only dream about.

Europeans don’t need to dream so much as that Nokia is feeding them with enough quality models. Like the N96 with the new Maps 2.0 for pedestrians and enough third party Symbian-developed software.

Even South America has more choices, models, services and opportunities than north-americans.

By holding to this piece of gold, the location data of a device; the carriers hold the whole location-based service industry from benefiting and expanding. It is crazyness.

Without enough critical mass to get location services started and having customers only from their own service to talk to, companies ahead of its times like Helio burn through more cash than this bubble is willing to spend.

Location data from devices (and application) should be made available for free. Be it CDMA or GSM.

But ARM-based Android phones that Google will give away at night parties flying out of Ames will, right? Them you have all sort of arrangements for that piece of gold that location became.

Unless Microsoft decides to crash the party to ship their own Java-based models now that Danger IP is theirs.

Or maybe the new beautiful iPhone SDK generated apps will make everyone happy until the Elections.

Motorola may feed into the whole Linux Mobile movement and hopefully will. And Nokia is also playing its card despite its reliance on Symbian. Trolltech wasn’t bought for show only. Plus, Nokia thanks to this purchase becomes a member of LiMo, the Linux Mobile Foundation.

Meanwhile, Nokia by offering the whole solution with real, useful devices and with infrastructure and software + map data to back it up will keep going with its dominance for some good years ahead.

At least, they (and you) know what business they are in.

Tags: Under the Hood, Nokia, Motorola by gpsguy
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Closing 2007 competition or merely survival skills get enough cash to keep Galileo viable.

Even Putin will keep track of his dog with Glonass, the Russian-based GPS that now has 18 satellites up in space.

Another successful launch for the American GNSS with Ariane 5 putting in orbit two new GPS satellites.

GPS chipset makers get through a consolidation phase where:

• Ceva sells its GPS business;
• Atheros Buys u-Nav;
• NXP buys GloNav

In the Map Biz Microsoft acquired U.K based Multimap. Via ItWorld.

Tags: Under the Hood, Technology, Hardware by gpsguy
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If you want to take a peek inside a Skyscout from Celestron with its GPS, compass (magnetometer by Honeywell + accelerometer from Analog Devices) head to EETimes’ TearDown for a freebie.

Click the red On Demand button (buggy on Firefox, works in IE + RealAudio) and register for a 15 or so minutes long video (slides with narration) by David Carey from TearDown. Parts list included.

EETimes publisher CMP, just put out the second issue of ‘Under The Hood” showing (besides the Skyscout) the guts of a Toyota Prius, a Blackberry 8100 Pearl, the Sony game controller and a bunch of other toys.

A good point made at the Skyscout presentation is the fact that Freescale doesn’t produce the MG4100A anymore. Guess Motorola sold that IP to Sirf at some point.

Tags: Under the Hood, GPS & Astronomy, Navigation by gpsguy
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Great article from the ground up of the GPS technology to current chipset makers. A pretty concise view of the GPS market and its applications.

Discuss-able around A-GPS but still covered enough material on less than three pages.

Tags: Under the Hood, Media, Hardware by gpsguy
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Some synchronicity on this one: spent sometime looking up stitching packages and ran into a local artist. Today I find an article on Digital Urban about the same sort of tooling but for the Nokia N95.

You are It

In other parts, (Vegas to be specific or Venetian Hotel to be even more) MEDC 2007 in on its way and Daniel Wagner in a research on Augmented Reality is showing SignPost2007, a Windows Mobile version of his project .

The Windows version evolved quite a bit since his early prototypes in a research project born at the Graz University.

SignPost uses a lower resolution version of tags similar to the QuickCodes used in Japan. The low-res encoding provides less combinations but it should be certainly faster to read/process.

The library used to prototype the “computer vision tracking” to read these tags AR Toolkit Plus is available for download.

Tags: Under the Hood, Development, Connecting the Dots by gpsguy
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Geophysicists might not tell us exactly when the Big One will hit. But they will make sure we know what happened after it comes by.

Using a technique known as Airborne Laser Swatch Mapping, USGS with help from several research groups as the Scripps Institute and State Universities has been working on what is known as the B4 Project to build a 3D map of the whole San Andreas Fault (from the border with Mexico all the way to the where it reaches the Atlantic Ocean). Yes, you will be able to see all of it in Google Earth too.

Eric Hendrick from Ohio State University explained that ground measurements are taken at the same time an airplane equipped with its own GPS receiver flies over the area. The errors introduced by changes in the atmosphere affect both equipments.

The ground station should always read a fixed, known location as a county benchmark for example (photo). By removing the errors from both datasets, a precision of centimeters can be obtained from its measurements.

As described by this page at the University of Florida website, the plane while flying

“at 150 to 200 kilometers per hour and an altitude of 500 to 1000 meters, with a scan angle of 10 to 20 degrees and a laser repetition rate of 2000 to 5000 pulses per second, an area of several hundred meters in width and hundreds of kilometers in length can be mapped in just a few hours.”

If you are trying to figure out how the laser works, read on:

“The round trip travel times of the laser pulses, from the aircraft to the ground, are measured and recorded along with the position and orientation of the aircraft at the time of transmission of each pulse. After the flight the vectors from the aircraft to the ground are combined with the aircraft position at the time of each range measurement and the three dimensional coordinates of each ground point are computed.”

An “After Project” will come by to collect data in the same way after the quake(s) with the same level of detail. All this data will be made available for the scientific community and general public to study it and try to understand what the heck happened with all that shaking.

At the end when you got your electricity back you might flyover the 3D maps in Google Earth to find where is now your backyard…

Tags: Under the Hood by gpsguy
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GPS World published a great interview with Nemerix CTO Lionel Garin, look up for the next buzzword after LBS.

It goes about his view on Wi-Fi + GPS and promises from Galileo’s precison with this quote:

”No company will develop an application until they have a reasonable view of this.”

as in how precise it will actually be.

Look also in the current edition of the magazine for a long “survey” of GPS receivers (of the professional kind, not Geocaching ones. No easily findable link for now.).

Tags: LBS, Under the Hood, Connecting the Dots by gpsguy
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Five hundred feet away from a Billboard when you drive by it on your Mini Cooper (about US$22K with few optionals). You broadcast where you are and gets a Hi back.

Mososo translates to Mobile Social Software or connecting the dots. The implementation I would like to see had this scenario:

Tag yourself with the best shows, videos, songs, books, movies and the best match will trigger the corresponding songtrack while he, she goes by your side while you were dreaming on the street.

MoSoSo is about how to connect everybody that wants to connect. Check Wikipedia for a pretty up-to-date list of projects and implementations.

The article on the Mini appeared on the MercuryNews today.

Tags: Under the Hood, GeoTagging, Embedded by gpsguy
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