Alright, let me tell you about this little project I’ve been tinkering with: Environmental tour guides. Sounds fancy, right? It’s basically building a simple system that gives you info about your surroundings.
It all started when I was hiking. I kept wondering about the plants, the rock formations, everything! So, I thought, “Why not build something that tells me?”. First, I figured I needed a way to pinpoint my location. GPS was the obvious choice. I played around with some libraries to grab the latitude and longitude. Pretty straightforward stuff.
Next, I needed a database of info. I didn’t want anything too complicated, so I started with a simple CSV file. Each row had the location coordinates, along with a description of the spot. Think like this:
- Latitude, Longitude, Description
- 34.0522, -118.2437, “Downtown Los Angeles: Lots of buildings!”
- 34.0500, -118.2500, “Grand Central Market: Smells delicious!”
Super basic, I know. Then came the fun part: matching the location with the descriptions. I wrote a little script that would take my current GPS coordinates, loop through each entry in the CSV, and calculate the distance. If the distance was below a certain threshold (say, 100 meters), boom, it would spit out the description. Used the Haversine formula for distance calculation, ’cause, you know, gotta account for the Earth being round and all that.
I initially just had everything running in a Python script on my laptop. Clunky, I know. So, I thought, “Let’s make this mobile!”. I dabbled with some mobile app frameworks. Went with something simple that I already knew a bit about. I got the app to grab the GPS from the phone, send it to my Python script (running on a server, now!), and then display the description on the phone’s screen. Basically a super barebones app.
The UI was terrible, I’m not gonna lie. Just a text box. But it worked! I could walk around, and as I got close to a location in my CSV, the description would pop up. It was janky, but it was my janky little tour guide.
Of course, there were tons of problems. The GPS wasn’t always accurate. The descriptions were…well, let’s just say they needed work. Battery life was a killer. And the whole thing was held together with duct tape and hope. But hey, it was a start!
Right now I’m thinking of ways to improve it. Maybe use a real database. Definitely need better descriptions. And a less ugly UI. Also, I’m looking into using some existing location data APIs instead of managing my own CSV. It’s a fun little project, and I’m learning a ton.
