GPS Visualizer
posted at 2025-11-01 in coding and graphic
Tracking routes
The idea of this project was to track routes I drove on my bike. It should be visualized how often I went on which route. The whole application should work without a phone and without any online tools.
For the tracking I used an old Garmin eTrex, that I had and for the visualization I utilized the tools that I already know. An early prototype was built in R and the final version is written Python with Matplotlib for the plotting, beautiful soup for reading the gpx files from the garmin, and geopandas to load shapefiles for the background map.
The resolution of the mapped points is scalable and the color theme is based on the beautiful inferno and viridis color maps.
after some bike trips this year, the map looks like this:
At a later timepoint, I wrote a second script, which plot the average height of waypoints included in the gpx files.
Right now, this script reads in all gpx files again in each run. For now this is not a big problem, but the runtime of the script is getting noticably long with 9 routes, already. So probably in the future I should make a version which stores the data of already scanned gpx tracks in a separate file and only adds the new tracks to it.
download the source code here.