As you may or may not know, Cemetech side-project Feedscreamer, aka Scouter 2.0, tracks and records GPS data in a simple delimited file format. I occasionally like to pull that data into Google Earth to examine the paths that it has created, which requires a simple conversion to a KML file. I've previously just done a series of find/replaces, but I figured I would codify it as a program. This trivial program (download link below) converts files with lines of the form "timestamp latitude longitude" (where timestamp is in seconds of epoch time and latitude and longitude are signed decimal numbers) into KML files. It even does intelligent sensing of where the GPS or device has been turned on and off to create discontinuous paths of multiple trips. Feel free to grab it from the link below. I've included a sample screenshot from feeding Cemetech admins' recent Maine trip data into the program; you can see our departure from Massachusetts, arrival in Maine, and return back to Boston.

Download
GPS2KML v1.0

Hm, I always forget how close NY is to Maine.

It's not THAT close, it is a 4.5-hour bus ride to get to Boston, 2 more hours to Shaun, then a four-hour car ride to where we were in Maine.

Yeah, depending on where you're coming and going, it could be, like, a 16 hour drive.

I think you'd actually enjoy this trace that GPS2KML generated, Shaun; you can see a lot of stuff from our trip, like the missed connection to I295, the GPS jitter when we stopped for gas on the way up and the rest stop on the way back, our little detour in Boston, etc. It's quite fun following the path. I'm wondering if this will be useful to anyone else.

Does it show the speeds and stuff, too? Then we could look at where we hit all that traffic on 95.

That's a great idea for an expansion for GPS2KML! It has the timestamp and location data, so it can easily calculate speed for each segment and color-code it, at the possible cost of bigger KML files. Good thinking.

that would be pretty cool indeed. Maybe categorize the color coding by increments of ten?