iNavX Day 1

I did a bit of iNavX testing yesterday. During the morning, I set my iPhone to not sleep and tested the battery life running iNavX. With about 30% screen brightness and 3G on but not used other than 15min e-mail fetching (my default for normal use) I got about 3 hours 10 minutes of operation running iNavX before the 20% battery warning came up (with the occasional interruption for about 2 or 3 phone calls that came in). I am sure this could be extended by turning 3G off but it is still not too bad considering the screen size. The one downside of the operation of the iPhone is that when the screen turns off, apps stop operation and therefore the GPS will stop tracking in iNavX. The program comes back up right where you left off, but if you care about your track, then you need to leave the phone on the whole time.

I took my iPhone in Otterbox case out on Rumours last night to give it a more realistic workout. With the bright sunshine and sunglasses I had to bump the brightness up to 100% which dropped the battery life down to about 2:40 before the 20% warning. Everybody onboard was fairly impressed. I still wish I could zoom out further, but it isn't quite as bad in operation as I thought it might be. I still couldn't see the entire course on one screen which is kind of ridiculous for such short course racing.

It also becomes obvious that the iPhone's GPS just isn't that good at determining a speed even when the low "HPE" suggests it had a strong fix. I have read that the OS 2.1 developers beta has some added location features to improve this, so I have hope, but the speed would regularly read between 5 and 21 kts when we were really going 7 to 8 kts. Positioning heading seemed better but you can see from the screen-shots that it doesn't show us actually rounding the gong and can that were our race marks. This won't be an issue if using a real instrument system over wifi (more on this Monday or Tuesday assuming I can figure it out on Visions over the weekend).

Update with Wifi Instruments

In other news, Woody was doing much better last night. He seemed fairly strong without the wobbles he had last week. If it wasn't for his shorn head, "F*ck Cancer" hat, and actually healthy weight loss, you might never know. Except of course he wasn't smoking like a chimney and went home after racing as opposed to the IYAC for drinks.