Many years agone I briefly worked equally a route surveyor. The labor involved walking 5 to x miles of route a day, painstakingly standard every route irregularity (e.g. potholes) together with recording the information on a handheld computer. The information was together with therefore used yesteryear the local authorization to position the close damaged roads together with schedule route repairs.
This was inward the days earlier the availability of commercial GPS units therefore everything had to survive measured yesteryear paw together with standard wheel. These days I imagine the labor could survive done at i hundred times the speed amongst cars fitted amongst a GPS unit of measurement together with an accelerometer. Or you lot could fifty-fifty practise it yesteryear bike.
Varun Adibhatla has created an interesting visualization of this sort of route surface survey carried out using a cycle together with an iPhone's accelerometer. Bumpiness inward NYC shows the trail of a cycle journeying inward New York. The bike's rails on the map is colored yesteryear 'bumpiness', amongst the close bumpy sections colored inward red.
Many laptops these days too accept built-in accelerometers. The Quake-Catcher Network realized that they could practise the world’s largest together with densest earthquake monitoring organization exactly yesteryear using the information from accelerometers inward the world's laptop computers.
The Quake-Catcher Network links participating laptops into a unmarried coordinated network that tin notice together with analyze earthquakes faster together with ameliorate than always before. QCN uses Google Maps to exhibit the information collected from participating laptops together with from participating desktop computers amongst USB sensors. The map too shows the latest USGS reported earthquakes.
