Flogs - osm

Sony DSC HX-5V - The OSM Mappers Camera? #2

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:15:34 +0200

Its definitly not the mappers Camera. After using it for a week i'll say - save the money for a decent GPS Receiver like the GPSMap 60Csx or similar. The Sony has the problem of non deterministic GPS Reception. Although it tells you it has good Satellite reception doesnt mean it'll write the current position to your images. Under real life conditions the accuracy of the GPS signal is bad and barely usable for OSM purposes. I am used to see which side of the road i was standing at (on my GPSMap 60Csx tracks). With the Sony you'll be happy to be able to identify the correct street. But this is only a random factor. Sometimes you'll get best accuracy - middle of the street, and sometimes you'll have something 100-200m off. Comparing with the GPSMap running under the same circumstances there is no real reason.
The Compass has other problems. It is very sensitive to acceleration and other technical gear. It takes some seconds to get a good bearing so there is no way to use it in the car, while cycling or something. You need to stand still, point at the direction you'd like to photograph and wait for 1-2 seconds.

The only good thing about the camera is the low shutter-delay and the Clocks accuracy. As the clock seems to be synchronized with GPS there is no need to take a photo of the GPS Receiver before. They'll have the same time. Photo v. GPS time offset is always 0. For that little "feature" i wont spent 350€.

JOSM Patch done - GPS Image Direction shown

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:18:42 +0200

So after nobody stepped up to write a little JOSM Patch to show the direction of the image taken by the Sony DSC HX5V i tried my luck fixing it myself. I have never touched Java before and i still dont like it, but it was quite easy to add a little arrow nose to the camera icons. I already sent it to the JOSM-dev mailinglist and hopefully it will be accepted.

Sony DSC HX-5V - The OSM Mappers Camera?

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:51:39 +0200

Cameras with GPS are rare and typically expensive. Now Sony produces a compact camera for ~350€ with GPS and even a compass to show bearing.

The Camera is easy to use - just put it into Easy mode and start shooting. Shutter-Lag is astonishing low. One thing which is a bit annoying is that as soon as you have a little rain and you have a little drop on your Windscreen the camera trys to make a "Macro" shot of the drop. The Macro automatic seems to be a little too agressive.

The GPS has assitance functionality (aGPS) which means that you may preload the GPS Almanach for the next days. GPS acquisition time is good when you put the assistme.dat
onto your SD Card. This is possible without special software or
knowledge. One simply needs to download the file and put it into the Private/SONY/GPS folder on your SD Card. When done you'll get a fix within 5-10 seconds after turning on the camera.

The first impressions are that the GPS works quite good compared to a GPSMap 60Csx when in good conditions. When entering the car it depends on where you put the Camera. On the passengers seat it already looses fix quickly. The annoying fact is that in case the camera looses fix it writes the last known good position into the image, which is okay when you only want to know which part of the city you are in, but we are OpenStreetMap mappers, we'd like to know which side of the street we are at. So the camera is missing a "shutter block without gps fix switch" or even better a choice what to do with images when there is no fix - "Last known good position", "No position" or "Shutter block".

So when you were planning to eliminate your GPS Logger with using a GPS enabled camera you are out of luck. The GPS is just a workaround when there is no GPS available and it needs training to produce usable results.

Here is another review with some Windows software capable of showing bearing and focal length as a horizontal angle - very nice. Someone working on a JOSM agPifoJ extension?

Openstreetmap

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:36:21 +0200

It been silent the last months. I was busy taking care of my Son. Our landlord was beeing trying to get rid of us with all kinds of dirty tricks (more later) and basically i was donating my free time to OpenStreetmap. Its a pleasure to create data which will be free and available for all time beeing. The surrdouning villages have now been mapped and seem to be more or less complete. Some things need finetuning but the map should be usable. When you live around Gütersloh, Mastholte, Rietberg, Langenberg, Benteler, Rheda-Wiedenbrück and like to help please have a look at OpenStreetBugs and provide feedback on errors on the map. You won't need an account or anything. Just point and click the map and give a short hint whats wrong at that place.