iPad in your ride?

[06dak287]

yes its my mission in life to rid the world of these devices that the evil corporation sells to people.....haha.

i have a hunch that your reading my posts out of context. i never recommended an android solely based on the usb...because using USB perriphreials between the 2 companies is the same process...i was comparing overall. pricing. ease of use. SD slots. HDMI outs. etc.

in fact i already know that using an ipad for this purpose is the same as using it with an android....i have both units. my android i prefer because of its advantages. i keep referring to USB because of people in earlier posts stating they wanted a hardwired external GPS puck....to which my usb statement came into play....if you read earlier i DID suggest bluetooth which is what i use because it doesnt take up a charging port on the pad and gets awesome signal vs the internal chip. nobody is talking about any USB setup that wouldnt make sense. i was saying that if someone WITH an ipad was dead set on USB hardwired antenna. they would need a host adapter (similar to bad elf) in order for any tablet to recognize a USB.

as far as software goes. i like that google and android are sleeping in the same bed therefore any cross compatablility between android apps and google stuff works flawlessly. and yes i do prefer Backcountry pro combined with google maps, over motionx. and because i can pair all my saved maps with my GMAIL account and combine everything from contacts to pics to email to offline map waypoints. much easier to save 30gb of map and waypoint data on the google server than my sd card or my internal harddrive.

i wasnt talking people out of BT and reccomending USB...in fact im sure my older posts recommended BT over USB with reference to keeping the charging port open for those long adventures....yes dualelec and globalsat are both bad ass super responsive BT antennas...

[SPONSOR]

Membership in the largest desert racing community has its advantages - Participate in Forum Discussions - Send and Receive Private Messages - Maintain Public Photo Albums - Access to Groups - User Profile in our Social Network - Increased Access to more Sub Forums - Reduced Online Advertisements Join our community today

[Zambo]

Well it sounds like we're in agreement about using a BT GPS puck no matter what other equipment you use. I can understand how you like that android and Google tie together seamlessly, in fact, that is what most Apple users like about their machines....all hardware and operating system software is brought to you by the same people so compatibility issues are minimized. The ability to export your data automatically, post it on your facebook page or your cloud or whatever is nice but for someone looking to race and/or pre run, IMO that stuff is secondary to the performance of the app in the vehicle. How many waypoints will it save, how long of a track will it make, how hard is it to save tracks/waypoints/icons on the fly, how good is the app at scrolling/zooming/updating/refreshing? How good of a job does it do rotating the screen in track up mode? Stuff like that. I googled Backcountry pro and saw a few screenshots but info about the stuff I just described seemed very hard to find.

[Zambo]

Okay I finally broke down and bought a gps puck so I could use my iPad in a vehicle. I took it out on the roads near my house yesterday to see how it worked.

First, my iPad is just a wifi unit, so there is no built in gps and there is no cellular data availability to the device. Pairing the iPad with the puck wasn't happening, so I rebooted the ipad and it paired right up no problem.

Next, I cached a bunch of maps onto the iPad using the menus on the MotionX app. It takes a while to download maps even though my wifi connection in the house is fine. If I were going to cache many gigs of maps like for a Baja trip, I'd plan on doing it overnight as it could take a couple hours to load all that data.

The map screen on MotionX has a little "present position" triangular icon button in the center bottom of the screen. Pushing this button once will show your gps position. Pushing it again evidently engages the internal compass and degrades the position keeping ability down to wifi/accelerometer only. I initially started driving in this mode and my displayed position was not very accurate at all, and the update rate was quite slow. Once I put it into gps mode however, my position on the map was dead nuts accurate.

As I drove around, the movement of the screen was about how I expected it to be. The screen would only refresh every second or two, so in that respect it is not ready for high speed racing. I believe this is a limitation of the app though, but I'd need to test other apps first before I can qualify that statement. When the screen does refresh however, the movement is pretty smooth, not jerky. For instance when you turn, it doesn't just ratchet the screen around like a Lowrance unit, it smoothly rotates so that your ground track stays vertical.

It also seems that they have fixed one of my main concerns with MotionX, which was the inability to display more than one track at a time. As you probably know, the race courses are usually spread over a number of tracks due to the file size. You now have the ability to display all of the tracks in the memory or select all tracks in a folder. I put the 3 tracks from the 09 V2R race into my favorites folder and made each of them a different color so I could distinguish them on the screen. I've attached a pic of what it looks like.

As I continue testing I'll post more info.

[Zambo]

As for map file size, just to give you an idea of how big the cache would be, here are two examples.

In this example, I downloaded the entire United States tile set from min zoom down to the max zoom pictured here and the size was just over 20MB.


In this file, I downloaded the entire Baja Peninsula down to this zoom level and it was a little over 50MB


There is a map scale in the lower right corner of the screen to give you an idea of the zoom level of the Urapan section. This should show just how much data you can put on even a 16gb iPad.

[Vegas_Nick]

This is the iPad setup in my FJ:




I use Motion X HD, and Delorme maps but also have Gaia and "TOPO" and Topo Offline maps. They are all ike different tools in the toolbox. It depends on where I am going and what I need to see. When I am way out in the desert and can get any sort of 3/4G signal, I will often switch to Google Earth. That works great for finding new trails. The Topo maps are great once you learn how to read them.

[Goatpoker]

Just keeping this fresh in everyones mind.

No for the really critical stuff, it will be billet aluminum. Do you like annodized or polished?

Custom engraved stuff on the bezel? Like "Goatpoker is Cool".. or just your company name would work too I gues.

[Forty1Racing]

Just keeping this fresh in everyones mind.

No for the really critical stuff, it will be billet aluminum. Do you like annodized or polished?

Custom engraved stuff on the bezel? Like "Goatpoker is Cool".. or just your company name would work too I gues.

I would like to see a anodized one with a logo.
Hows the project coming?

[glamiskid395]

Is there a list of things to buy to get an android tablet going and an iPad going?
I want to set up my chase truck but trying to read thru this thread has confused the heck out of me.

Thanks
Mike

[Zambo]

For the iPad you need:
1. iPad (duh)
2. Power cord for the iPad
3. GPS puck, preferably bluetooth
4. Power cable for the bluetooth gps
5. Applicable app, such as MotionX or other nav app
6. Ram or other brand mount for the iPad

You can run without the power cables of course but the screen on the iPad will drain the battery fast.

[Zambo]

At V2R, I spent all day in a chase helo. The pilot had his iPad mounted on top of the glare shield and he was using MotionX to navigate the race course. He had a different app for navigating thru different airspace along the way. I spent a lot of time helping his use the software and at the end of the day I had a few points that I sent to the MotionX people:

1. The waypoint font is WAY too small to read while doing anything dynamic
2. There needs to be different waypoint icons instead of just the same yellow sign
3. The app is recording your trail every 700 milliseconds, but the screen only refreshes every 2-3 seconds. Great for recording, not so great for racing.
4. In course up mode, your present position icon should be nearer to the bottom of the screen so you can see more of what's in front of you
5. There should be an extended line in front of your vehicle that you can set to be a fixed distance, like one mile for instance. As you zoom in and out the line gets longer or shorter, but you always have a quick and easy distance reference in front of you.
6. The ability to show numerous trails at the same time is great, but the max number of waypoints is still too small.

I traded quite a few emails with one of their tech guys and the feedback was positive, so standing by hopefully for some changes.