igotugps

Code and description of how to extract all data off the Mobile Action Igotu GPS loggers (widely used in wildlife tracking)

Get the most from your GPS tracking data!

Note If using these scripts, please aknowledge the author (Tom Evans) and direct others to where this code is located.

Downloading data from GPS devices and running R code to process this

1. Downloading data from GPS device

Install igotu2gpx

Download and install igotu2gpx: https://launchpad.net/igotu2gpx

• If you have a Linux machine you can install this directly, otherwise:
• In theory this will run on Windows and OSX. I didn’t manage to get it to work well on Windows, and I haven’t tried it on a Mac. My recommendation is to use it with Linux. If you do that you can either install Ubuntu or similar on an old laptop/ PC, dual-boot, or install on a virtual machine. The last is what I have. I have VirtualBox to run the virtual machine, then install Ubuntu/ Linux on that.

Download data from a Mobile Action igotu GPS device

Download data from GPS tags using igotu2gpx. There is a graphical user interface (gui), but that doesn’t have as many options as the terminal commands. So I run igotu2gpx from the terminal using the following commands (after having plugged in the USB download cable and attached a GPS logger) to get a bunch of different information and files (examples of downloaded files are in the ‘guillemot_example.zip’ file):

1. Download the raw GPS fix information. It’s in a bit of an odd format, but we can fix that (see below).

$ sudo igotu2gpx dump --format details > g31_details.txt

2. Get all data off the tag. This is in some compressed format. Currently I don’t have a use for this file, but it feels good to have in case it can be useful in the future!

$ sudo igotu2gpx dump --format raw > g31_raw.txt

3. Produces a GPX file, which can be viewed in Google Earth and various other programs.

$  sudo igotu2gpx dump --format gpx > g31_test.gpx

4. Produces a *.kml file, good for Google Earth.

$  igotu2gpx dump --format kml > g31_test.kml

5. Download the tag configuration data. I find this quite nice, as you can check then that the tag was configured as you thought. Or if you forget to note down how you configured the tag!

$   sudo igotu2gpx info > g31_config.txt

2. Convert the *_details.txt file (from above) using R.

• Have a look at the example file g11_details.txt (in the zip file guillemot_example.zip).
• You can see that you get a bunch of information in addition to that you have with the @trip software. There is EHPE (estimated horizontal positional error), and also the id numbers of the satellites used, from which you can work out the number of satellites used for a fix. The file is in a funny format though, not immediately easy to use – so we need to convert it.
• I have written a function for R that processes the *_details.txt file into a useful format. In the attached ‘R files’ see ‘parse_igotu2gpx_txt.R’. To work out how to use that see ‘parse_igotu2gpx_txt_example.R’.
• If you are feeling ambitious then you can have a look at ‘parse_igotu2gpx_txt_to_db.R’ which is an R script wrote to process all the *_details.txt files in a directory and output them to a database table (MS Access in my case). This could be useful if you are collecting a lot of data from many birds, so want to efficiently extract all this data.

Good luck!