mybiketraffic.com updates
Varia RCT715 updates, Strava connectivity, and live traffic
This post documents a few updates on one of my research projects: mybiketraffic.com.
Garmin Varia RCT715
First, Garmin just released a firmware update to the Varia RCT715 that overlays traffic speed of the approaching vehicle onto the videos being recorded. This could be an important step in the “labeling” of my AI work in calculating video speed from video data. I was already planning on taking the radar data and overlaying the speed data onto each vehicle, but this would keep me from having to do that step.
You must also update the Garmin Varia iOS (or Android) mobile app to the latest version. Afterwards, the data overlay section for displaying speed in the camera settings looks like this:
Strava connectivity
Do you use my app and wish you could display the radar data on your Strava ride page? Well, now you can … kinda … Strava doesn’t give me that kind of control to change the way your Strava ride map looks or overlay any data onto it, but I have now added Strava connectivity so that you can automatically have the vehicle count, vehicle stats, and a link back to the ride on mybiketraffic.com added to your ride description on every radar-enabled ride that you do!
Also, I have been putting this off forever because I knew it would take a while when it really shouldn’t. And it did indeed take TWO WEEKS of work with the first 3 hours of that figuring out that I was missing the www in my registration on the Strava API website. The codeigniter framework I’m using on mybiketraffic.com redirects all mybiketraffic.com to www.mybiketraffic.com, which is perfectly fine except that in doing so the Strava data is lost during the redirect because the session cookie which is necessary for keeping a user logged in doesn’t get served before the redirect, so my code was losing the important Strava token info during all the shuffling around (redirecting). All I had to do was register www.mybiketraffic.com instead of mybiketraffic.com. THREE HOURS to determine why my login wasn’t being preserved. It was, literally, a four character fix: www.
Check it out here: (you will have to create an account and login first and it doesn’t really work until you have also connected your mybiketraffic account to Garmin or manually uploaded radar-enabled rides to mybiketraffic.com)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/users/strava
Mybiketraffic iOS app under development
I’ve begun work on creating a companion mybiketraffic iOS app that will let you stream in real time the radar data to a tracking page. People will be able to see your radar data in real time and watch cars pass you in real time. Do not send the tracking link to loved ones because they will not want to see how many or how fast cars are driving when they pass you.
chatGPT code hallucinations
Lastly, I posted a quick work blog related to something I discovered while working on the mybiketraffic Strava connectivity. I encountered what I’m calling a “code hallucination” when I asked chatGPT to write me code to download the original Garmin FIT file using the Strava API. This is NOT a capability provided by the Strava API, but chatGPT happily wrote reasonable code and made-up a parameter that is a perfectly reasonable way it could have been implemented. Read more on my work blog: https://cs.briantoone.com/2023/05/09/chatgpt-code-hallucinations/
Re: “made-up a parameter”... I wonder what else it makes up when asked more mundane questions... no way to know the provenance of the information it’s drawing from and no way to judge its credibility ...