New Microsoft "smartwatch". Altimeter/wingsuit recorder?

[mdrejhon 8]

I see that the Microsoft Band has come out.

Only 199 dollars. Cheaper than a skydiving altimeter!

I observe it has built-in GPS and a full color screen, and able to go to 14,000meters. It can upload data to a smartphone. In theory, a simple app could make it act as a secondary altimeter, but I am especially interested in app-developable wearable GPS screens.

It would be cool to mod one of the new smartwatches on the market, to behave as a wingsuit/tracking flight path recorder, with potentially real time angle/speed feedback (e.g. Color change or flashing) on the display, especially as I can't hear beeps/audibles due to my deafness.

For an independent programmer, one could make an app to run on them for skydiving purposes! And a companion app for a phone, to display data in a skydiver-friendly format.

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

My experience trying to use a GPS tracker on android is that it's a pretty low-quality data source, very prone to losing points on my skydive. I might be willing to trust my life to something like a flysight (Which seems to be an extremely high quality data source.) I'm not going to do so for a GPS chip in a general purpose phone-type device.

I do have some C++ libraries available if you're interested in messing about with such a thing, though. See https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/gpx2kml and https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/coordinates for a good start. Potentially you could run a state machine and throw out anomalous points from second to second. Getting anywhere close to the accuracy of a Neptune in real time would take a fair bit of work. I've kind of put everything on a shelf until I can afford a Flysight (Read: Want to afford a Flysight more than anything else that costs $400 that month) but am eventually planning to have some code capable of reading my day's worth of GPS points after the fact, breaking out my jumps and plotting them on Google Earth.

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

[quade 4]

I would look at the spec sheet before getting too excited.

If it's in a watch sized unit, my "guess" (which is all that it is but still somewhat valid) is it uses a GPS chip that doesn't have a refresh rate that draws a lot of power. It is probably temporally low resolution. A GPS chip that's constantly updating is something that uses way more power than you'd want to use in a watch sized device.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[mdrejhon 8]

Very good points.
Many GPS chips can be reprogrammed at higher or lower rates, but you are right: the limitations of the watch architecture may provide hardware (power management) and software limitations (vendor API).

I deploy my coding to a whopping 18 smartphones on my job, but they are work-only devices. The GPS refresh rate of some high powered smartphones are so good that maps scroll realtime at low latency with low predictivity, while others are so low and erratic. I wonder if anyone has tested a dozen or two smartphones, to see if any have GPS refresh rates (and altitude accuracy) programmable to be sufficient for mid-air tracking.

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

I've tested the samsung galaxy S3 and S5. The S5 is starting to get pretty good -- I get a few anomalous points with the S5, but it seems to get most of my jump pretty accurately. The S3 was terrible for not tracking half my jumps at all and losing a lot of points in the rest. I don't run any custom software on the phone, though. I just run mytracks to collect data points and then process it with my C++ code later on. I kick out KML, which you can then plot in Google Earth or Openlayers. Mytracks can output KML directly, but it doesn't handle altitude very well. For some reason, the original designers didn't seem to take into account someone being 2 miles above ground level...

I've thought it'd be neat to write a server that could replay the jumps of a full load of skydivers at a later date (Or possibly in real time.) Google earth doesn't give you a lot of room to develop applications, though their javascript API does provide a little more flexibility through the browser plugin. Openlayers seems to provide a bit more flexibility and is open source, but isn't as pretty overall as Google Earth is. You can do network links with Google Earth (And I'm pretty sure Openlayers as well,) so I've found you can display the location of a moving object from second to second by running a network link with a 1 second refresh. Then you can run a server on the other side and have it emit the point data back to Google Earth.

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?