OpenStreetMap
To deal with the excess consumption of Christmas I have rigged my mountain bike with GPS Tracking so that I can plot tracks and get fit at the same time. I'm using a Garmin 12XL I've owned for a good few years now and found that nobody sells handlebar mounts anymore. The few that still had stock were asking £30+ for something a bit fancier than I needed. I had a dig around in my workshop and found an old ever-ready cycle light mount that with some sawing, drilling and filing now makes a cracking handlebar mount for my GPS.
I have used a cable made up from some connectors I purchased at http://www.pfranc.com/ (I have some of the originals that were black). This cable allows me to to power the GPS from a 12v gel battery similar to those used in burglar alarm panels and not have to worry about power. The battery is simply carried in a bag in the drinks bottle holder.
I found some new firmware for the 12XL (new to me anyway) but I have found that the auto setting in the tracklog is now not recording with sufficient frequency for accurate maps as it cuts corners. I simply have to set a suitable logging rate for the speed I intend to travel and I get nice rounded corners again or slow down for intricate bits.
I have done a couple of trips and captured most of the key roads for Winterton, Ormesby and Hemsby and have uploaded the Tracklogs to OSM. Hemsby has been edited in JOSM and should appear soon.
Discussion
Comment from danceswithcars on 1 January 2009 at 16:02
wondering what program you use to download the tracks, I've got a garmin edge 205 which I can't get gpsbabel (opensource) to read. Also the mounting problem is fairly universal, as one broke on my bike (someone else did it?) and $20+ to replace a little piece of plastic is absurd. Also wanted to make a wrist attachment, as going on rental bikes and just on and off the bike commuting, don't want to leave that behind by mistake... Anyway thanks for sharing biking info on OSM...
Comment from KevK on 2 January 2009 at 12:56
I've been using a windows program called GPS Trackmaker http://gpstm.com that reads the log files on my 12XL. I'm using the free version and it does all I need i.e capture track logs from the GPS and capture live tracks to disk on the move so I don't have to worry about filling my 1024 point log in my GPS.
The serial lead is in the same bag as the battery for my bike setup so I don't have to extract the GPS each time I need to dump the track logs.
I wanted to go open source on everything but GPS Trackmaker was first past the post and does all I need. I've looked at GPSylon, GPSDrive, GPSMan etc. but you tend to stop looking so hard when you have solved your requirement. I'll post my findings when I've got a working Linux alternative.