Introducing the Freerunner Navigation Board

Helge Hafting helge.hafting at hist.no
Wed Jul 21 11:00:40 CEST 2010


On 03. mai 2010 13:05, Michele Brocco wrote:
> On 5/3/10, Helge Hafting<helge.hafting at hist.no>  wrote:
[...]
>> For cars, one can get USB equipment to read the odometer pulses (and
>> lots of other stuff besides that.) A similiar sensor can be
>> made for bicycles - having an input for that on the board
>> would be very useful. (And given the slow cpu, a pulse counter
>> so the software won't have to rely so much on pulse timing.)
>>
>> This is great for driving in tunnels. There are many mountains
>> and tunnels where I live. Having navigation work inside tunnels
>> would allow mapping them accurately for openstreetmap. And also have
>> underground navigation - some tunnels have got
>> intersections/roundabouts inside, with several possible exits.
>>
>> And then there are cities with too many tall buildings, and things like
>> parking houses.
>>
> In principle that would work. In practice I am afraid that will work
> for only short distances due to the noise of the sensors. In my
> opinion we should first focus on use cases in which short distance
> tracking is required. I think the success rate there may be higher and
> we can the build on our findings more complex applications.
> Personally, I will focus on that. I would be interested in seeing also
> other use cases implemented though.

I think one approach can work for all.

Software that auto-calibrates the other inputs while the gps signal
is good, will know the precision of the other inputs. When gps drops
out, it can provide location data until precision deteriorates into 
uselessness.

This may not take long with a cheap accelerometer - but the software 
will automatically work for much longer if more precise equiopment is 
connected.

Helge Hafting



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