Progress in Measurement
Diligently tracking workouts and pondering my home-made data logger and digital compass improvements, I recently started comparing the latest Garmin Edge 305 device with what I could build on my own.
While conducting this research I discovered the Ascent shareware for Mac OS X. This program does a nice job of incorporating all of the Google Earth data and displaying paths on the maps. If your recorded data is good, and complete, then it’ll show the right plots. If your data is bad, or incomplete, then it doesn’t help much. I thought I’d give it a try for a while, using my own recordings. I then had to work out how to import flat file or Keyhole Markup Language data into Ascent, given that it does not support these formats for import. Rather than rebuild my GPS data logger’s firmware, which is the best answer, I built a translator chain from flat file to GPX format, using my own KML generator from flat file to KML using Applescript, and then using GPSBabel to translate from KML to GPX using XSLT. The GPSBabel program is fairly comprehensive and supports a variety of formats. The Ascent map here shows the result using data from today’s ride.
My translator chain clearly has a time stamp issue, on my side of the sequence, given that the GPS time is lost in the first place and never makes the flat file. If I had that and passed it along from each data point, Ascent would compute all of the rates for the plots as well as color gradients on the track. My Specialized PeaBrain heart rate monitor displays but does not record, and it does not have a cadence sensor, so rather than build all of this stuff I’ll probably break for the 305. Either way it seems like Ascent will be a nice tool.
Ascent Training Software
Sunday, May 20, 2007
