Don Gettner at Ridge Engineering sent me a couple of interesting emails related to the price of technology. Don is the programmer behind our PC-TAS counting program and he has been in the traffic counting industry for more than 30 years (working different stints at Jamar, Diamond, and I believe Miovision among other companies).
His first email was about the multitude of tablets (with a usb port) that cost less than $100. There are a couple of different apps out there that allow you to do a turning movement count on a phone or tablet. As I’ve blogged about in the past, I love them in theory but the lack of tactile buttons is a deal breaker based on our testing.
There might be some use for tablets to use as recorders for license plate matching studies. Maybe use voice recognition software so a person can record the dataset in the field or from videos? We can also use these tablets with the PC-Travel software.
His latest email is about a GPS tracking module that costs $179. This could be used for different types of floating car speed studies, but would need software built around it.
Do you have any ideas for traffic counting hardware/software we should be exploring?
Mike,
There are a number of companies making Ipad/Iphone silicone tactile overlays. I don’t think it would be to tough to have a custom one made to match one of the counting apps such as TurnCount.
I’ve included an article about them.
http://www.cnet.com/news/touchfire-overlay-adds-tactile-feedback-to-your-ipad-keyboard/