Electro Gyro-Cator

#1

Post by martinml » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 11:49 AM UTC

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#2

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 12:03 PM UTC

That's pretty neat. Any idea on how accurate it was? The real breakthrough in navigation imo is not so much the display of a map but rather the lack of display of more data than you actually need at the moment. Turn-by-turn navigation is what then really drove adoption. GPS may not have been necessary to achieve this and this article is a nice reminder that there are more ways than one to skin a cat.

Do any present day navigators use inertial guidance when they are out of reach of satellites? (I know mine doesn't when I enter a tunnel it seems to continue to coast based on the last known info when the signal was lost, after more than a few minutes, for instance a traffic jam it gets wildly erratic.)

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#3

Post by tachyonbeam » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 3:50 PM UTC

The steampunk alternative to GPS

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#4

Post by mvidal01 » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:32 PM UTC

Someone in the military did a technical evaluation of the Electro Gyro-Cator. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a138283.pdf

Pretty interesting.

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#5

Post by mistagiggles » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

"A marking pen was also included to help make personal indicators on the map if needed."

It's disappointing that modern technology no longer supports being annotated with a marker pen.

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#6

Post by keville » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

mistagiggles wrote: post #5

"A marking pen was also included to help make personal indicators on the map if needed." It's disappointing that modern technology no longer supports being annotated with a marker pen.

Can't tell ... if trolling ... or serious.

Even Apple has gotten around to selling a stylu^H^H^H^H^H Pencil for your tablet; Microsoft has been _pushing_ theirs for years, and Samsung uses it as a differentiating factor on their smartphones.

Re: Electro Gyro-Cator

#7

Post by kazinator » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:59 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #2

That's pretty neat. Any idea on how accurate it was? The real breakthrough in navigation imo is not so much the display of a map but rather the lack of display of more data than you actually need at the moment. Turn-by-turn navigation is what then really drove adoption. GPS may not have been necessary to achieve this and this article is a nice reminder that there are more ways than one to skin a cat. Do any present d…

Never mind inertial guidance; just distance traveled from the odometer would help, based on the commonly true assumption that the tunnel is straight.