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You gotta start somewhere and they did. There is certainly room for improvement and no doubt there will be. But Minelab moves slowly when they move at all so my advice to folks is to not be holding their breath. Remember this is not new, it is a carryover from the CTX 3030 and so when you look at it from that perspective there has been no real attempt made at upgrading the GPS capability for a long time.

There is nothing we can do about the GPZ side of things ourselves but somebody out there could easily develop a replacement for XChange that would work for all CTX and GPZ owners. When you add CTX users there are a lot of people out there who might pay a few bucks for a decent replacement. I am nowhere near being a programmer and I think I could do it if I put in the effort. For a genuine programmer it should be a trivial project.

Where the GPZ shines for me is in being able to track my ground coverage on screen as I go to insure I leave no gaps. I can go back at any time later with old tracks loaded up and simply take up where I left off. Marking nugget finds has also paid off seeing patch patterns develop. It is just far easier to do it with the GPZ than with a separate GPS unit. I did not trust the thing and was using both my Garmin and the GPZ for some time, but now that I have the workflow down I finally gave up on the Garmin.

I am not trying to sell anyone else on this so please understand I fully accept whatever reasons people have for not using it and complaints about all the things it could do but does not. I get it. But for anyone interested I am really, really going to be doing up a set of articles on the finer details very soon. Been on the back burner all summer for obvious reasons.

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Yeah I understand the getting it done perspective, no one would ever release an actual product if they kept doing incremental fixes before releasing it.

 

Right, property lines, outlines of areas I want to detect, structural features I map myself like veins and faults, patches of target formations exposed that I find via aerials, etc etc. Mostly just paths and polygons though when it comes down to it. That's a good idea if I'm understanding you correctly with the geometries. You are suggesting just reversing the conversion process with a KML file back into the ML format that contains paths or shapes drawn in another program like Google Earth?

 

BTW, I'm not a professional programmer by any means. I just learn what I need to write tools to automate jobs I need done, maybe similar to you? I've scripted in Python and JS but I can probably follow along with whatever  languageyou are writing in.

 

I'm heading out for the rest of the afternoon, but from what I recall when I was looking at doing a similar thing in March is that the GPZ has some kind of fairly low storage capability when it comes to points and paths which would limit fairly drastically the ability to import shapes. Though if you defined a bunch of shapes as discontinuous paths then you could have a huge number of shapes represnted by 1 path to get around that maybe? I have to admit I haven't even touched the GPS since that time so my memory is not serving well here. It'd be interesting to know if the storage limits are arbitrary and if so what the actual onboard storage capabilities are (in some goldfields I have multiple thousands of points, paths, and polygons) or if the firmware limits are there because of physical flash memory limitations. My pie in the sky hopeful idea for image overlays also has a problem and that is the screen resolution limitation.

 

I'm sure your article series will be very good and many people will discover how to use something they otherwise never would have.

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You got it Jason, I was thinking just plotting lines in Google earth than using the kml to import the same lines into the GPZ.

I am a computer nerd from when it all started, but I learned long ago investing much effort in learning stuff was lost effort as things change so quickly. So I just figure out what I need to do what I need when I need it, just like you. I use a very obscure and no longer supported program called GDIdb Pro http://www.gdidb.com that can tap into any database and output almost anything. I used it to tap into our in store system for price and inventory information, add details held in an access database, and combine it all into html that automatically loaded every day to create the old online store at AMDS. It built the entire website from scratch each morning and uploaded changed files, so price and inventory information always matched the in store system. It ended up being a very long and very complex script but I had a ball developing get it as it exceeded anything I could buy off the shelf. The main thing about GDIdb Pro is it is dirt cheap, simple, powerful, and very well documented. I own a licensed developer version that lets me create runtime executables but they would be needlessly complex. I was looking at alternatives last night and had pretty much decided Python would be easy enough to learn and use as a mainstream alternative but sheesh, like I need something else to do! I can do what I need to do for just me already - like I say and as you can understand producing something that works for others is definitely more work.

If you are interested the site above allows the shareware version to be downloaded. It has been superseded by modern languages but is ridiculously powerful for such a compact little program.

GDIdb Pro has some native connectivity but for SQLite it uses ODBC. So somebody like Norvic would need a PC. Then they would need to download and install the SQLite ODBC driver from http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/ They would then have to install the GDIdb runtime and execute my script. Like I say, kind of clunky but it would work.

I have been thinking of starting a thread on hacking the GPZ/CTX but I am frankly concerned about somebody not using proper precautions hosing their GPZ so I am not going there yet. I want to see if I can purposefully wipe my GPZ and if it then reboots with all needed files or at least can be restored from a generic backup first. The last thing I want is Minelab getting service calls because people mess up the files. It would not be warranty either so best to be cautious. As usual I am juggling lots of stuff but I am "on it" now so will sort it out quickly.

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The GPZ has 32MB to play with I think, but some artificial limits, like 10 tracks/paths. And maybe 1000 find points? More stuff to double check but it is less a memory limit than limits imposed in software. They certainly could have put in more memory, cheap stuff these days, but then again you run into the issue of just how much stuff do you want in that GPZ in case somebody "borrows" it? Probably best to dump every couple days like I do now, even if it could hold more.

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It may just be easier also to use SQLite Databrowser or one of the other couple freeware alternatives I am playing with to write a SQL script to do the same thing but I need to play a bit more with using SQL to generate kml. It looks like those programs can save SQL scripts and if so then they could be shared and run by anyone.

If anyone is following any of this at all please, please use saved copies of mldata and GPZ7000.MLX for any and all experimenting!!! And before anyone asks who does not know what or where those are it is looking more and more like a hacking the GPZ thread is in order.

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That's awesome with the store database, I didn't think many prospectors were computer computer nerds like myself too haha. So many things you can do with them though, it's endless fun even when it's for work. Creating a tool and watching it work and save you countless hours of time is a great feeling.

 

Databases are one area I don't have a lot of experience in, though I have worked with SQL before in an oilfield database some time ago. I should probably relearn it all. You are definitely more knowledgeable than me there though.

 

My problem is that I get really into doing something, then I finish the project, then I forget everything I taught myself so I have to spend a few weeks relearning when I pick it up again to make something else. That's the reason I like Python though, it's so straightforward to me it just makes sense and it's real easy to relearn for me. But it sounds like database scripting is definitely the way to go for the GPS project you are working on anyways.

 

A hacking GPZ thread would be cool. On a somewhat related topic, but not related to GPS, I was just looking at the update files and I redownloaded the update yesterday out of curiosity, the file now is named different and is 10% smaller than it was when they first released the update. I have both update files, going to try to figure out what the difference is. I asked ML but they didn't reply, which isn't surprising I guess since I highly doubt they want people tinkering around in their firmware but ah well.

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