Ok, everyone riding a bike always wants to know how big the hills they climb are. There isn't any easy and commonly avialable way to keep track of this, so I've decided I'm going to try and do something about that.
So, I wrote a program that can create these graphs from GPS data - It requires you to have a GPS unit (I got mine on eBay for $60, they've gotten cheap).
Anyway, how it works:
At the start of your ride you turn on your GPS, and throw it in your camelback/saddlebag/whatever.
At the end of your ride, you turn the GPS back off, and go home.
At home you plug your GPS into your computer, and download the data to a text file.
Then, you feed the text file into my program, and it makes you a nice pretty graph that looks like this:
GRAPH
The above image is a graph of one of my actual rides. This was from a mountain bike ride on some of the trails around where they hold the Sea Otter Classic, near Monterey California. Unfortunately, my GPS batteries died about 3 miles into my trip, so it only shows the first part of the ride, but the graph is still just as good.
And just for fun, here's a screenshot of Google Earth showing the same ride that this graph was made from (the red line is the route shown in the graph).
Google Earth Screenshot
Google Earth, unfortunately, won't make this type of Elevation Profile map, which is why I started writing this software.
So, I wrote a program that can create these graphs from GPS data - It requires you to have a GPS unit (I got mine on eBay for $60, they've gotten cheap).
Anyway, how it works:
At the start of your ride you turn on your GPS, and throw it in your camelback/saddlebag/whatever.
At the end of your ride, you turn the GPS back off, and go home.
At home you plug your GPS into your computer, and download the data to a text file.
Then, you feed the text file into my program, and it makes you a nice pretty graph that looks like this:
GRAPH
The above image is a graph of one of my actual rides. This was from a mountain bike ride on some of the trails around where they hold the Sea Otter Classic, near Monterey California. Unfortunately, my GPS batteries died about 3 miles into my trip, so it only shows the first part of the ride, but the graph is still just as good.
And just for fun, here's a screenshot of Google Earth showing the same ride that this graph was made from (the red line is the route shown in the graph).
Google Earth Screenshot
Google Earth, unfortunately, won't make this type of Elevation Profile map, which is why I started writing this software.
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