push position to Google Earth in realtime

[bigLibrarian]

Hi,

I am developing a navigation solution - a back end application that
combines position updates from several sensors including GPS - to
generate real time position. I want to display the real time updates
to Google Earth so I can save time and effort in developing the front
end (possess no skills in design of UIs/front ends ) and utilize a
feature rich tool like Google Earth for displaying my position.

Currently I log my tracks and parse them to a KML path file. I can
display this path using Google Earth, but only after the track is
complete. While displaying path is better than having no display, I
would really like to learn to display the real time updates.

My question is this - can I compile (fprintf) the position updates in
the requisite KML format and send it to a serial port allowing Google
Earth to display the updates?

- Thanks

[Josh L]

Hi there,

I am not sure of your entire backend workflow, but you can
theoretically use KML Update to push out incremental updates as you
get more data. See http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kml_21tutorial.html#updates

Cheers,

-Josh

[bigLibrarian]

Josh,

That does look promising. Thanks.

-BL.

[mcahornsirup]

Push works like a charme. The only thing you should consider is the
polling. E.g. if yo poll for updates every second, your server get a
hit every second - even if there is no update available. E.g. if a
person stands still, the device does not need to send a new position
to the server and therefore, the server has no new updates to provide.
If done this successfully, but I'am going to use a push mechanism.
Just a flag telling the ge to poll or stop polling. It's a kind of
workaround for this kind of issue.

Regards,

Steffen