Garmin ‘Explore’ feed – max number of ‘points’?

  • Hi, this plug-in looks great! have managed to get it working with ‘proxy: ‘ external KML feeds. just samples for now. in the long run i’m looking to pull in a Garmin ‘Explore’ account KML feed (rather than just embed the ugly Garmin map share iframe into my WP site). i’m building a charity Kayak challenge tracker map and website. we haven’t got the Garmin device or ‘Explore’ account up and running quite yet, but 2 questions –

    1) has anyone done this successfully yet (with a live Garmin KML feed)?
    2) is there a limitation with Garmin KML feeds? i’ve been reading that there might be a 200 node limit on the KML files from Garmin, which for a 2,000 mile kayak challenge will definitely be an issue for displaying a full ‘track’ of progress.

    any thoughts, suggestions on this?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hi, this is cool!
    I just tried this with my inReach and I have couple of issues with it:
    1. Map doesnt center to my last location. It will open always Eindhowen from Germany.
    2. The KML file contains only one point. If inReach is sending out another point, then the KML file is updated to the last point. So the KML file doesnt contain track or lets say series of tracking points. Only one and the last point.

    It seems that Trackserver plugin doesnt save or cache the points and therefore cannot show the track. Only last point can be shown on the map.

    Do you have any ideas how to overcome from this issue?

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by leivo.

    This plugin has the leaflet-omnivore.js.
    Inside of this file is a “kml: function(doc)” and under it “function getGeometry(root)”. This function is reading the kml-file and pushes all coordinates found in KML-feed into local array “geoms”.
    As the KML-feed file contains only one coordinates point under the Placemark->LineString, the array named geoms will contain also only one point.

    The only solution to show a inReach track, is to read the KML-feed and every time when the file is updated to save/append these coordinates into another file and then point Trackserver to read that new file.

    Plugin Author tinuzz

    (@tinuzz)

    Hi,

    @tallhat:

    I can’t answer your questions about Garmin Explore. I can only tell you that there is no artificial limit in the number of nodes in a KML file in Trackserver. I do think that very large KML files will pose challenges when read in the browser in an application like Leaflet (especially since we’re using Leaflet-omnivore, which converts the KML to GeoJSON in memory before displaying it). Performance might not be fantastic.

    @leivo:

    Yes, your assessment is correct. Trackserver can display external files (like KMLs from a different service) but it does not import those into the Trackserver database. They are displayed as-is. So if the file at the given URL is updated with just a single point, that is all that Trackserver can display.

    If your want to combine these updates into a track, you can do it in two ways: 1) like you said, construct a new KML file every time there’s an update, or 2) write an importer that adds the points from the KML to the Trackserver database, using one of the available live tracking protocols, OsmAnd being the easiest to implement with tools like cURL or wget.

    Regarding the map centering on Eindhoven: this might be a bug. Trackserver tries hard to find the bounding box of the loaded tracks and center the view on the center of the box, but there are reasons this could fail. I could have a look, if you can direct me to the page that you’re hosting this on.

    Best regards,
    Martijn.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by tinuzz.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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