Garmin GPS in an RC glider

After this month’s eFlea my buddies Dave and Eric came over to the Domicile of the Future and we had a fun technology summit. It seems that Dave had strapped on a Garmin Edge 705 to Eric’s RC glider. The Edge 705 is a small GPS meant to help runners and bicyclists train. Gotta count those verts don’t you know. So the GPS recorder makes a breadcrumb file that has a tcx file extension. You can take that file and put it into Garmin’s website to share or keep private. Garmin’s website also lets you expert the tcx file as a comma separated file or a .kmz file that you can then just drag and drop into Google Earth. Then you have a 3-D representation of the path the RC plane took as Eric spent 17 minutes playing around the California hills. The link above will let you look at a couple screenshots as well as download the kmz file, or open it directly in Google Earth. If I open it directly Google Earth does not zoom in far enough to let me see the track—sisnce I don’t know where Eric was I don’t know where to zoom further in. If I save the file to my desktop, and then drag the file into the image area of Google Earth then the darn thing zooms in enough to see where Eric was flying.

A Garmin Edge 705 GPS recorded this flight of an RC model. You can convert the native Garmin format to a Google Earth format that then displays the flight track in 3-D.

The next task is to figure out how to “fly” the track form the point of view of the airplane. If anyone knows how to do this in Google Earth let us know in the comments.