Projects / Where in the World is James?

Where in the World is James? is a live dashboard, tracking James Bowthorpe's circumnavigation world record attempt by bicycle. He's doing this to raise £1.8 million for Parkinson's research. Globecycle.org details his trip, but this page will explain how the live tracking and dashboard work.

James' bike has been fitted with a SPOT Satellite Messenger unit. It consists of two main components: a GPS unit and a satellite modem. When enabled, the SPOT unit takes a GPS fix every 10 minutes and reports it back to the SPOT servers, over a satellite connection. Because it's backhauled over satellite, not cellular networks, we don't need to worry about poor reception or data roaming charges. The unit is hardy and the batteries last for up to two weeks on 2xAAs, which is frankly astounding.

Every 10 minutes the dashboard web server fetches James' last known location and timestamp from SPOT, storing it locally. That data builds the route for the map and is used to calculate James' mileage (and possibly later), his average speed and ETA.

The dashboard also pulls in geotagged photos from James' Flickr account, and his recent Twitter messages.

All of the position data is available as a JSON export - feel free to do something exciting with it, but please let me know if you want to hammer the server.