Over the “holidays” I’ve been busy working on a leisure project of mine: on-server analysis of binary sbn/sbp files which are created by Locosys GPS Loggers. These will be used on the popular Bavarian Speed Kini (speed-kini.de).
Speed-kini is a speed contest among windsurfers in Bavaria based on top speed and the speed over the fastest 500m. The logging is done by Locosys Loggers which produce binary files with a lot of parameters concerning precision and validity of the data points. The precision parameters are considered in the analysis. Until now there are only offline, desktop-tools which can do this analysis (and which cost money btw 😉 ). Until now the administrator of speed-kini.de analyzed the files on his own computer and then uploaded the new entry. As the number of competitors is growing really fast, there was an strong need for automatization. This is where I stepped in.
At first I concentrated on doing the correct analysis of the data files. Which was not too easy because the sbn/sbp files are basically proprietary files with no real documentation. By having a look at the source code of gps transformers I got most of the data fields right. With the SDOP it was a bit more difficult because this is pretty new and not documented anywhere. So that part was mainly “trial-and-error”. But in the end I got the analysis right.
The next step was the integration of this functionality into speed-kini.de. Using a lot of help is provided by the Gravity Forms API, I was able to integrate it pretty smoothly into WordPress and Gravity Forms.
If you’re interested in server-side sbn/sbp analysis, please drop me a line.
