Since March I’ve been using a Garmin Forerunner Watch while out running to track my location via GPS. I finally decided to put the data I’ve collected over the past 8 months/250 miles to good use after playing around with heatmaps for my Uni project.
A combination of PHP and JavaScript exports all tracking points from the Garmin software (over 20K unique points), performs the necessary adjustments and plots them on a HTML5 Canvas. Using the example code provided by Patrick Wied, this is then turned into a colour-coded heatmap and saved as a PNG image. A bit of manual fandangling later and the result is overlaid on a Google Map.
I still need to sort out the projections a bit, but for now it gives a good enough picture to see where I’ve been running. My only wish was that Nike+ included GPS data as I could have shown a lot more exploration of the local area (I don’t know whether the iPhone version does, but my old Nano definitely doesn’t). Maybe one day I’ll turn this into a proper mini web-app people can use.
