Check This Action Out
I added a PostGIS-enabled Postgres database with location and tracklog tables, seeded with McKinley's camps, the summit, and home. As Spot beacons arrive, PostGIS finds our nearest point of interest, so you can tell which camp we're at. Next: a Loopt-esque iPhone app.
Okay, so, I added a Postgres database (which has support for PostGIS) to the system. I've got a "location" table and a "tracklog" table.
In the location table I added about a dozen points-of-interest, including McKinley base camp, the five other camps and the summit, Talkeetna, Anchorage Airport and my homes in New York and Atlanta - each of which is defined by a longitude/latitude, altitude and a description.
In the tracklog table, which starts out empty, I add a row every time a position broadcast is received from the Spot locator (that I mentioned in a previous post) - so that I can see everywhere we've gone and when we were there.
So, you combine this altogether, specifically including PostGIS's ability to find the closest point to a given point (our current location) from a set of points (the points-of-interest) and you should be able tell about where we are. Specifically, when we're climbing, it should be obvious which camp we're at.
Next up: since my iPhone can feed me a longitude/latitude, I think I'm going to make a simple Loopt-esque iPhone app that'll push my location to the server (which is my laptop at the moment), log it to the database, and push it out to the blog. And I should be able to view, edit and add defined locations through the app as well. Hmm.
