I programmed the equivalent of a satnav for canal boats

[Michael Donning]

Hi all,

I did some kind of travel time scheduling tool for our canal holidays as a private project. I know that this is a bit overkill but I simply couldn't resist.

 

It is a website which can be installed as an app or more exactly a "PWA". It should work on most devices like mobile phones, tablets or PCs (the latter usually have no GPS though).

 

That app/site is created from the perspective of a holiday hireboater. Questions like: How long it is until the next lock? Should we pull the kids/lock crew away from their phones already? Is enough time left on our schedule to do a little detour? And so on...
That's the reason why I posted in this subforum.

 

The canal data is from CanalPlanAC https://canalplan.org.uk. But due to caching on my side it may be up to one year old (I wanted to keep their server load low).

 

Please don't take the app too serious. But if you want to play around with some software, there you go:

 

https://canalcompass.de

(I am from Germany, therefore the german domain ".de" which is cheaper for me.)

 

There's also a youtube video:
https://youtu.be/mHV-EDqPgpI

 

And two screenshots:

 

Edited September 13, 2024 by Michael Donning

[Slim]

So, a light hearted response. 😇

 

Why? Any hire boat will come complete with appropriate cruising guides showing  distances, locks, lock rise, nearby facilities such as boatyards, fuel, pumpout etc etc etc as well as shops and PUBS. easily shared with crew without the risk of losing a £1K device over the side. All in a quarter of the time spent accessing data.

 

Whatever, enjoy your trip. 🤩  

[Michael Donning]

Yes, there are guides/folders with information aleady on the boat and naturally, we also brought our own printed Nicholson guide.
But usually, we got our phones anyway in reach (except when it is raining) to catch some blurry photographs of the local wildlife:

[Slim]

2 minutes ago, Michael Donning said:

(except when it is raining

Have you ever been to England.😇

[sigsegv]

Just had a little play with it on my laptop (no GPS obvs), nice little app! Definitely going to try to use it for a cruise, will let you know how it goes. Any chance of publishing it on Github?

 

P.s., I played Narrowboat Simulator after our first narrowboat holiday and before we bought our boat to scratch that itch, thank you so much for making it!

[Michael Donning]

Thank you, I'll be happy to hear your feedback. GitHub isn't planned right now. But some browsers developer consoles allow a bit of insight in the code (although "minified") and especially the locally stored data 

[Arthur Marshall]

I do like gizmos. I shall try this out on next week's cruise. Thanks for sharing it.

[Duke of Branta]

Thank you! I'm already planning our route for next years Birmingham Canal Navigations 24 Hour Challenge, I will take a look and see whether it can augment our plan!

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Edit: On first glance, this looks pretty damn good! I'm looking forward to running throughout the challenge next May, I'll let you know how it goes! 👍🏻

Edited September 14, 2024 by Duke of Branta
Spent some time exploring the app

[StephenA]

We've basically got that for Canalplan, we've just not been developing it because of other things going on, which have also impacted development / bug fixing on the core canalplan code.