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27 Articles

Historical map of The Netherlands overlayed with clouds

Hacking Global Positioning Systems Onto 16th-Century Maps

November 25, 2024 by 9 Comments

What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchants navigated the sprawling city with woodcut maps. Or sailors plotting Atlantic crossings with accuracy unheard of for the time. This whimsical intersection of history and tech was recently featured in a blog post by [Jan Adriaenssens], and comes alive with Bert Spaan’s Allmaps Here: a delightful web app that overlays your GPS location onto georeferenced historical maps.

Take Antwerp’s 1565 city map by Virgilius Bononiensis, a massive 120×265 cm woodcut. With Allmaps Here, you’re a pink dot navigating this masterpiece. Plantin-Moretus Museum? Nailed it. Kasteelpleinstraat? A shadow of the old citadel it bordered. Let’s not forget how life might’ve been back then. A merchant could’ve avoided morning traffic and collapsing bridges en route to the market, while a farmer relocating his herd could’ve found fertile pastures minus the swamp detour.

Unlike today’s turn-by-turn navigation, a 16th-century GPS might have been all about survival: avoiding bandit-prone roads, timing tides for river crossings, or tracking stars as backup. Imagine explorers fine-tuning their Atlantic crossings with trade winds mapped to the mile. Georeferenced maps like these let us re-imagine the practical genius of our ancestors while enjoying a modern hack on a centuries-old problem.

Although sites like OldMapsOnline, Google Earth Timelapse (and for the Dutch: TopoTijdreis) have been around for a while, this new match of technology and historical detail is a true gem. Curious to map your own world on antique charts? Navigate to Allmaps and start georeferencing!

An International Hackerspace Map

October 29, 2024 by 17 Comments

If you’re looking for a hackerspace while on your travels, there is more than one website which shows them on a map, and even tells you whether or not they are open. This last feature is powered by SpaceAPI, a standard way for hackerspaces to publish information about themselves, including whether or not they are closed.

Given such a trove of data then it’s hardly surprising that [S3lph] would use it to create a gigantic map of central Europe with lights in the appropriate places (German language, Google Translate link) to show the spaces and their status.

The lights are a set of addressable LEDs and the brain is an ESP32, making this an accessible project for most hackers with the time to assemble it. Unsurprisingly then it’s not the first such map we’ve seen, though it’s considerably more ambitious than the last one. Meanwhile if your hackerspace doesn’t have SpaceAPI yet or you’re simply curious about the whole thing, we took a look at it back in 2021.

Thanks [Dave] for the tip.

Misleading GPS, Philosophy Of Maps, And You

September 10, 2024 by 19 Comments

The oft-quoted saying “all models are wrong, but some are useful” is a tounge-in-cheek way of saying that at some level, tools we use to predict how the world behaves will differ from reality in some measurable way. This goes well beyond the statistics classroom it is most often quoted in, too, and is especially apparent to anyone who has used a GPS mapping device of any sort. While we might think that our technological age can save us from the approximations of maps and models, there are a number of limitations with this technology that appear in sometimes surprising ways. [Kyle] has an interesting writeup about how maps can be wrong yet still be incredibly useful especially in the modern GPS-enabled world. Continue reading “Misleading GPS, Philosophy Of Maps, And You” →

A Look Inside The Geochron Clock

May 31, 2024 by 6 Comments

There are plenty of cool clocks out there, and maps by their very essence are cool, too. But a map that’s also a clock — or is it a clock that’s also a map? — has to be the coolest thing ever.

Of course we’re talking about the Geochron, a world clock that makes the relationship between the Earth and the Sun clear and has graced the offices of executives who want to impress visitors with the global nature of their importance for decades. [Attoparsec] has long coveted one of these electromechanical beauties, and when a used one popped up online for a pittance, at least compared to what they cost new, he jumped at the chance.

The Geochron he ended up with was in need of some TLC, but surprisingly little considering its mid-1980s vintage. The real treat in the video below is getting to see how these wonderful devices work. They’re basically simple slide projectors. While we here in the future would simply do everything in software on a nice flat-screen display, the base map, night-day terminators, and calendar are all contained on transparent elements that move under the power of a synchronous motor across a lighted platen. The analemma display is particularly cool; an indicator tracks the Sun’s position over the Earth with a cam that encodes the equation of time in its shape, moving through its familiar bi-lobed loop as the seasons progress.

Any clock that comes with a set of blueprints for installation purposes is alright in our book, and kudos to [Attoparsec] for landing this prize and getting it back in shape. His description of it as “the greatest clock of all time” is apt, but perhaps with a little competition. Or maybe a lot.

Continue reading “A Look Inside The Geochron Clock” →

Cockpit of a Hawker Siddeley Trident with the moving map display

A Live Map Display In A 1960s Airliner

January 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

We tend take GPS navigation for granted these days, so it’s easy to forget that it became only available in the last few decades. Aviation navigation used to be significantly more challenging, so how was the Hawker Siddeley Trident, a 1960s airliner, fitted with a live updating map display? In a fascinating dive into aviation history the British Airliner Collection has spun up an insightful article on the magic behind these moving map displays.

Without access to satellite navigation or advanced electronics, engineers had to get creative. Enter the Trident’s moving map display, a marvel of ingenuity that predated the GPS systems. Using a combination of Doppler radar and some clever mechanics, pilots could accurately determine their position without relying on any external signals.

The system makes use of four Doppler radar beams, arranged in what was known as the Janus array. This configuration corrected for errors caused by changes in altitude or wind drift, ensuring accurate ground speed readings. The movable antennas mounted under the cabin floor could adjust its orientation to maintain alignment with the actual direction of travel, calculating drift angle precisely. Combined with compass information and flight time from a known start point to to indicate the current position with a pointer on a rolled paper map. The system was well ahead of it’s time, and significantly easier to use and more accurate than the Decca radio navigation system in use at the time.

It’s mind boggling to see the solutions engineers came up with without much of the digital technology we take for granted today. Gyroscopes for inertial navigation, the cavity magnetron for radar and radial engines were all building blocks for modern aviation.

Thanks for the tip [poiuyt]!

A Homebrew GPS Correction System For DIY Land Surveying

January 12, 2024 by 60 Comments

For those of you rushing to the comment section after reading the title to tell [Ben Dauphinee] that his DIY land surveying efforts are for naught because only a licensed surveyor can create a legally binding property description, relax — he already knows. But what he learned about centimeter-resolution GPS is pretty interesting, especially for owners of large rural properties like him.

[Ben]’s mapping needs are less rigorous than an official survey; he just wants to get the locations of features like streams and wood lines, and to get topographic elevations so that he has a general “lay of the land” for planning purposes. He originally engaged a surveyor for that job, but after shelling out $4,600 to locate a single property line, he decided to see what else could be done. Luckily, real-time kinematics, or RTK, holds the key. RTK uses a fixed GPS station to provide correction signals to a mobile receiver, called a rover. If the fixed station’s position is referenced to some monument of known position, the rover’s position can be placed on a map to within a couple of centimeters.

To build his own RTK system, [Ben] used some modules from SparkFun. The fixed station has an RTK breakout board and a multi-band GNSS antenna to receive positioning data, along with a Raspberry Pi to run the RTK server. An old iPhone with a prepaid SIM provides backhaul to connect to the network that provides correction data. [Ben]’s rover setup also came mainly from SparkFun, with an RTK Facet receiver mounted on a photographer’s monopod. Once everything was set up and properly calibrated, he was able to walk his property with the rover and measure locations to within 4 centimeters.

This was not an inexpensive endeavor — all told, [Ben] spent about $2,000 on the setup. That’s a lot, especially on top of what he already paid for the legal survey, but still a fraction of what it would have cost to have a surveyor do it, or to buy actual surveyor’s equipment. The post has a ton of detail that’s worth reading for anyone interested in the process of mapping and GPS augmentation.

Carving Terrain Maps Into Plywood With Software Help

November 28, 2022 by 20 Comments

CNC machines are incredibly versatile tools. At a machine shop, they can machine all kinds of metal and plastic parts. Beyond that, they can engrave various materials including glass, and even create PCBs. [Steve] has a CNC machine of his own creation in his shop, and while he might be employing it for those common uses, his artistic creations are on the showcase for today with these 3D topographic relief maps.

The key to creating a good topographic relief map is good material stock. [Steve] is working with plywood because the natural layering in the material mimics topographic lines very well, especially with the high-quality marine-grade birch plywood he is using. Making sure to select pieces without knots improves the final product substantially, as does taking the time to fill any voids. Selecting good stock is only part of the process though. [Steve] is using TouchTerrain, an open source project helmed by [Dr. Chris Harding] of Iowa State University, to create the model which gets fed to the CNC machine. Originally intended for 3D printing applications, the web-based tool lets you easily select an area on the globe and export its topographical data to a standard STL or OBJ file.

With good stock and the ability to easily create 3D topographic maps, anyone with a CNC machine like this could easily reproduce their terrain of choice. We imagine the process might be easily ported to other tools like 3D printers, provided the resolution is high enough. We have also seen similar builds using laser cutters, although the method used is a little different.