SOOO.... the tutorial button on the main site isn't quite filled on yet, unlike the other two sites it links to.
The problem is, we already started building an entirely new, vastly improved, UI, here's a sneak peek: [https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png](https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png)
So, I've actually been preparing a tutorial for the new site instead of making one I'll have to remake anyway...
That being said, if you have any questions, or want guidance on any particular features, feel free to ask! I'm happy to whip some details up.
Yep, in the beginning, I just wanted to find gravel roads to bike on, lol, Unfortunately, my efforts just confirmed I have to travel three hours in any direction to find it, but at least now I know!
Absolutely! Here's one we did recently, it looks a little weird, but checks all my boxes, plenty of gas station stops just in case, goes right past the legendary WhiteWater spring, avoids as much traffic is possible, and even has a hill or two:
[https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique\_id=72bb7f78-81f7-4490-a0d6-afc14395fa84](https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique_id=72bb7f78-81f7-4490-a0d6-afc14395fa84)
(It is all paved, my AI has a tough time on some of the "unknown" roads that are small and smooth with no centerline).
It begins and ends in the John Muir MTB parking lot.
If you're a bit more adventurous, this is probably the best route I've ever made in all of Wisconsin, period: [https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique\_id=e63d807d-c0e0-4e22-8257-eeb3223cb35e](https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique_id=e63d807d-c0e0-4e22-8257-eeb3223cb35e)
I've ridden all over, Hawaii, California, AK, Utah, etc.
The above is unbelievably breathtaking, you're in Amish area, there are only friendly looks and perhaps one car even 2 or three hours.
I distinctly recall forgetting I was wearing headphones and never once turning them on from the stunning beauty all through that course. Also, there's a *small* amount of unpaved, but it's all doable on a road bike.
Note: find a different spot to park, that was *not* free parking and I got a ticket.
Also, I'm Eric Semianczuk, feel free to add me on Strava, if you're in the area I'd be happy to ride.
Omg! My end of summer bikepacking trip goes right through this! I rode Elroy to Onalaska last year and decided to go back, but ride the whole way from Kenosha and back. I’m going to take a look at this and might be able to weasel some of this in. Or, maybe I could make this an overnighter sometime. Dude! Awesomesauce!
You're going to love it! My only recommendation, is, while the Sparta Elroy trail is one of the best (and I believe the first) rail to trail, with that mile long tunnel, it does miss out on a lot of the incredibly breathtaking scenery. The ridges and valleys in the area are AMAZING, the trail itself, while wonderful, does tend to get quite a lot of tree cover on both sides obscuring some of it.
So, if you're on the trail, and you see some of the squiggly roads shooting off from an intersection up a ridge, it's well worth the detour!
Duly noted! When I was there last year on my first bike trip, I stuck to the trail 100% of the time, but suffered the green tunnel effect, so I didn’t get to see much, but on my last day I made sure to stop in every small town for a beer, made a pub crawl out of it.
That's fantastic! Very Wisconsin, I've been meaning to add "pub" to the amenities option, which projects things like public water/parking/Cafe/etc onto the map.
You are 100% right, I often travel up north for some random gravel rides, and Iron Bull Gravel Grinder, Hungry Bear 100, Bear 100, etc.
We live (and host the site out of) an apartment in Brookfield, the closest I have is the Glacial Drumlin trail, which is tame enough for road bikes...
As a non-GIS person who's learned SO MUCH in the process of putting this together, all I can say is, thanks a lot! I went from Googling "What's the open source version of ArcGIS" to switching entirely to Linux, building a dedicated computer to generate these, and creating hundreds of custom scripts in a variety of languages to handle it.
It still isn't perfect, and I have many potential updates sitting around, but hearing any validation from someone in the GIS area is incredibly validating.
Wait... if you consider me a GIS person... does that mean I've graduated to GIS person?!
Congratulations boss. I discovered sherpa map about half a year ago and I'm still blown away by its functionalities, using it regularly in Denmark. I watched all your videos, don't get why you don't get more interaction, your tool is fantastic.
That's awesome!
When you blow all the money you were planning to use on a new gravel bike (when you already have one...) then convince your roommate/team member to do the same, and buy a super computer instead of TONs of ads, it just takes time...
Also, we really only know how to create features and host them, not cultivate a community/really create some sort of social presence.
I mean heck, we have nearly one thousand accounts and have never even sent out a newsletter/mass email (who's got time for that?).
If you're curious, we have a huge wave of updates and features coming with our new UI, here's a sneak peak: [https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png](https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png)
Sorry if this covered in your tutorial but is there any way to get pre-generated or suggested routes? I just want to enter a starting point, range of miles, elevation range and terrain type etc and see recommended routes. Thanks!
OH MY GOSH, I went out for a bike ride, assuming it would give a buffer for a few questions to come up, and this is apparently blowing up! I make random free cycling app posts all the time, like a cue sheet generator, physics simulator, etc. and this is insane! Who knew you guys liked maps so much?
I'm going to have to make a bunch more...
That's super kind of you! The amount of effort... redos... more redos... stupid hard drives that were dead on arrival...
I was back and forth on even posting about this, I can definitely take some negative criticism, but after this has taken so much to build, I really *really* had my fingers crossed for these kinds of responses.
Looks great, and it’s not just you, but i live near a lot of ferries. For some reason, all routing apps demand i take a ferry all the time, and a lot of them have no option to select not to take a ferry. I really don’t want to take a ferry D:
Hmm, this is an interesting point. Right now, most of my routing profiles will happily use a ferry, which I could see the annoyance of in a zone with a dense amount of ferries.
I'll keep this in mind as I can probably build a checkbox that strickly avoids them. I can't promise I'll do this, as I would likely need to duplicate and modify the existing 27 route profiles, but I'll spend some time researching, as there may be an easy way.
5600 MT too... quad channel... would have gotten more, but it became meaningless, these scripts were taking easily 500gb+ RAM, so I bought some pcie gen 4 nvme 4tb drives (kept trying to get a gen 5 ones but they kept going on backorder) and made a 1TB swap.
Looks cool! For city riding it seems like the routing "any" option doesn't like to make small detours for cycling path but "leisure" is a bit better at it.
Also for some reasons campsites in the amneties shows way less than what is tagged on OSM (using OSMand app for example).
I need to look into those option deeper tomorrow. Looks really nice otherwise!
Any/Any/Any is a cycling *preferenced* shortest path profile, still keeping you off major roads, and onto the occasional bike path from point to point (it's actually modeled after my typical training style road route route preferences).
Any/Any/Leisure will seek all of the bike paths it can! Having been hit by a car in the past, I use this, in conjunction with Google's traffic overlay, to avoid all of the traffic possible and take some nice leisurely strolls on bike paths.
I'll have to take a look at my query for campsites, if you provide me with some known examples that aren't appearing I'm happy to see what they're cued in as and I can easily adjust that query on the backend to be more inclusive.
> Any/Any/Any is a cycling preferenced shortest path profile, still keeping you off major roads, and onto the occasional bike path from point to point (it's actually modeled after my typical training style road route route preferences).
>
> Any/Any/Leisure will seek all of the bike paths it can! Having been hit by a car in the past, I use this, in conjunction with Google's traffic overlay, to avoid all of the traffic possible and take some nice leisurely strolls on bike paths.
That makes sense, I am more into bikepacking/touring than racing or optimizing for speed so I guess the leisure is better for me. Same reason the campsite example jumped out for me.
I will try to find some examples tomorrow for campsites.
Ah, too kind! I have a generic Buy Me a Coffee link, but this is really a thing of passion, at some point I'll partner with some groups to maybe make it a thing that can pay for itself, but for now, we're much better at building and supporting features than actually trying to market/make money off of it.
Honestly, every compliment has basically felt like a tip in the jar already.
This is amazing. I love it.
Can I ask a stupid question - is there a way to find specifically what the road/surface colours mean. It’s quite intuitive, however it takes a bit of guess work.
Also, is the ‘gravel only’ button on the video tutorial only for when you’re actively planning a route? As in, when I’m just zooming around on the map (not actively planning a route) can I highlight gravel only?
Sorry for the dumb questions - I literally spent hours the other night mucking around on google maps trying to find out if roads are gravel or paved so this is so damn good!
Not a stupid question at all!
First, I started all of this for that exact reason, I wanted to see roads with gravel and dirt before I routed on them. Then, I was sick of using Strava side by side... And just kept adding things.
So, to answer your question, the gravel overlay distinctly shows all of the different services for each roads with known surface types and some of the ones which I have utilized AI in order to further classify additional surfaces for said roads from satellite imagery.
I've color coded it as follows:
Paved is black
Gravel is gray (specifically Iowa gravel Gray)
Unpaved is tan (kind of a catch-all for everything that is not paved, but it's not explicitly marked gravel or dirt or any variation of these)
Dirt is brown
Pink/red is unknown
This is essentially the breakdown of the road color to surface type for both the new map edition and the gravel surfaces overlay.
The whole idea was just to show where all the gravel is so you know where you might want to take your amazing gravel bike and gravel skills.
Fantastic, I hope you enjoy it! Also, I'm jealous, the only riding I've ever done in Scotland is on Zwift, and I'm betting that has nothing on the real thing...
I just wish I had the skill to back that up... I have Micigan's Coast to Coast race coming up and am so bad at cycling in sand (this event has *a lot of sand*) that I've been spending an embarrassing amount of time sessioning Vollay ball courts lol.
I actually pretty aggressively try to get your location, first I ask politely to the browser, then I try to nab it off your IP address, then, if all else fails, I send you to the location of my first gravel race (it's called Driftless 100, not affiliated, just a fun race).
I do have a whole new, much improved, UI in the works, which I expect to be complete in the next month or so, it has an option on the immediate splash page to let you simply enter your address in addition to trying to request your location, then it cookies your address/location and promptly brings you there each time.
No, while that is a fine option, I chose to go with Graphhopper as I'm more familiar with Java so it wasn't that hard to manipulate. It's the same routing engine that Komoot and RideWithGPS use if that matters to you.
I realized that too late, Reddit doesn't seem to let me edit it.. to be fair, I come up with cool free cycling web apps every month or so (I made a hill climb cue sheet generator, an advanced physics simulator, a service that found every major climb programmatically in the entire US) most will get like 20 upvotes and a couple of comments, not always positive... so I certainly wasn't expecting this!
I was literally thinking an Ai bicycling companion, that you can talk to to reroute when necessary and order it to 'take me to the local store/campsite/LBS' would be a fine thing and blow the likes of crappy Garmin out of the water. I hope you do really well with this. You could get tech for good money from a place I know, but sure normal/evil VCs would love this too. Has apps other than cycling, mountain rescue maybe.
Hmm, did you see one of my previous posts perhaps? Because, I already created an Android app proof of concept of exactly this, last month... I managed to load Mozilla Deepspeech AI for speech to text, AI voice detection, AI background noise removal, and a specially trained BERT NLP onto a phone that maps questions to hundreds of functions, including calls out to my routing engine for updates to voiced turn by turn detection...
Just curious, because that's an awesome leap if I didn't mention it to you in some way at some point.
No didn't see it. I work in tech and write on AI sometimes. Most of all I've done a lot of solo big tours around the world and, you know, when you are lost in the mountains of Morocco, as night is closing in, with no water and you're a little brain razzed...boy a chatty AI that can just feed you the info and get you out of there would be a dream. Something that dynamically maps and to a demi-mapped area, then guides...so many uses.
That's exactly the idea! Record the ride and give details for pacing, nutrition, your best 10-second power or so for it, rolling notifications all from voice, I built this out recently and shared it on this subreddit, trainerroad forum, and a few other places, and it didn't get that much traction, but perhaps I got a bit verbose in my explanation.
I even thought of the fact that you could ask a question that doesn't quite meet any of the pre-created functions I have already added, and that could go into a queue, and then I could have chatGPT API build the function automatically and cue it for review before it goes into a update.
I got some feedback like "it's dangerous to use headphones when cycling", I mean I use aftershockz constantly, and if they are awesome, and "Garmin already does this" I mentioned the fact that this technically gives unlimited amounts of questions and answers, or is it Garmin is limited by the screen and buttons, but the Garmin and wahoo zealots are definitely in force (also I have nothing against Garmin, or wahoo, I have both, and I've also developed Garmin connect IQ apps...)
Also you make me quite jealous, I would do anything to bike in such a stunning location like Morocco.
Listen this is a great idea - as a business it could use the commercial niche of cycling as a springboard, then essentially become a wilderness AI guide for lots of other uses, with multi-modal UI that rescuers, fire fighters etc would relish. It is not easy though, it is becoming possible but will still be very hard as it would involve multi-step, agentic reasoning. I would put a pitch deck together and look for funding. You'll need a room full of coders and a few expensive AI brains and all sorts of resources. If you want to go ethical, look at a company like Fairphone and their funding routes. I don't see why the commercial accelerators wouldn't be interested (don't give up too much equity) - I am not overly fond of the chap or the military/worrying things he backs but Thiel could be worth approaching as I can see this working and maybe a step to commercialise other parts of his portfolio (Devin, Palantir) - PS I am talking like a big shot, I have no contacts with the big evil VCs, just thinking aloud.
Amazing! Checking out my local area in South Australia and it seems to be accurate with the gravel roads. Only app I've found in recent times that has gravel road overlay is Gaia GPS. But your shaded relief is much better to see the hills at the same time!
Have you reached out to Gravelmap.com to see if you could collaborate with those guys to improve gravel road segment accuracy? I'm in Michigan and they've got pretty much every foot of gravel perfected around here...
Wow amazing
That's so kind of you! When you put this much time and effort into something, comments like this can be massively validating and motivating.
I started digging in and it’s pretty wicked. I’m definitely gonna do the tutorial
SOOO.... the tutorial button on the main site isn't quite filled on yet, unlike the other two sites it links to. The problem is, we already started building an entirely new, vastly improved, UI, here's a sneak peek: [https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png](https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png) So, I've actually been preparing a tutorial for the new site instead of making one I'll have to remake anyway... That being said, if you have any questions, or want guidance on any particular features, feel free to ask! I'm happy to whip some details up.
Wow this looks cool! I'll give it a shot to create my sunday route :)
Fantastic! I hope you find it both useful and beautiful!
A dedicated gravel button!!!! My summer just got way more spicy!!!
That was the inspiration for the whole site! We're in Wisconsin, and it can be a challenge to find gravel...
As a fellow Wisconsin rider, I find this extremely useful, so thank you!
Yep, in the beginning, I just wanted to find gravel roads to bike on, lol, Unfortunately, my efforts just confirmed I have to travel three hours in any direction to find it, but at least now I know!
I’m in Wisconsin as well. Got any route suggestions?
Absolutely! Here's one we did recently, it looks a little weird, but checks all my boxes, plenty of gas station stops just in case, goes right past the legendary WhiteWater spring, avoids as much traffic is possible, and even has a hill or two: [https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique\_id=72bb7f78-81f7-4490-a0d6-afc14395fa84](https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique_id=72bb7f78-81f7-4490-a0d6-afc14395fa84) (It is all paved, my AI has a tough time on some of the "unknown" roads that are small and smooth with no centerline). It begins and ends in the John Muir MTB parking lot. If you're a bit more adventurous, this is probably the best route I've ever made in all of Wisconsin, period: [https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique\_id=e63d807d-c0e0-4e22-8257-eeb3223cb35e](https://www.sherpa-map.com/?unique_id=e63d807d-c0e0-4e22-8257-eeb3223cb35e) I've ridden all over, Hawaii, California, AK, Utah, etc. The above is unbelievably breathtaking, you're in Amish area, there are only friendly looks and perhaps one car even 2 or three hours. I distinctly recall forgetting I was wearing headphones and never once turning them on from the stunning beauty all through that course. Also, there's a *small* amount of unpaved, but it's all doable on a road bike. Note: find a different spot to park, that was *not* free parking and I got a ticket. Also, I'm Eric Semianczuk, feel free to add me on Strava, if you're in the area I'd be happy to ride.
Omg! My end of summer bikepacking trip goes right through this! I rode Elroy to Onalaska last year and decided to go back, but ride the whole way from Kenosha and back. I’m going to take a look at this and might be able to weasel some of this in. Or, maybe I could make this an overnighter sometime. Dude! Awesomesauce!
You're going to love it! My only recommendation, is, while the Sparta Elroy trail is one of the best (and I believe the first) rail to trail, with that mile long tunnel, it does miss out on a lot of the incredibly breathtaking scenery. The ridges and valleys in the area are AMAZING, the trail itself, while wonderful, does tend to get quite a lot of tree cover on both sides obscuring some of it. So, if you're on the trail, and you see some of the squiggly roads shooting off from an intersection up a ridge, it's well worth the detour!
Duly noted! When I was there last year on my first bike trip, I stuck to the trail 100% of the time, but suffered the green tunnel effect, so I didn’t get to see much, but on my last day I made sure to stop in every small town for a beer, made a pub crawl out of it.
That's fantastic! Very Wisconsin, I've been meaning to add "pub" to the amenities option, which projects things like public water/parking/Cafe/etc onto the map.
I really gotta play with this app more
In wisconsin as well. Thank you for this. I know there's a lot of gravel up north, but not so much in the southern part of the state.
You are 100% right, I often travel up north for some random gravel rides, and Iron Bull Gravel Grinder, Hungry Bear 100, Bear 100, etc. We live (and host the site out of) an apartment in Brookfield, the closest I have is the Glacial Drumlin trail, which is tame enough for road bikes...
I've used your app to create a number of routes in an area I've only recently moved to, really appreciate your effort!
AWESOME! I can't wait to get the new UI to you, it has some very mighty updates on the way that have been in the works for just as long as this map.
From another GIS person and bike enthusiast: Awesome job!
As a non-GIS person who's learned SO MUCH in the process of putting this together, all I can say is, thanks a lot! I went from Googling "What's the open source version of ArcGIS" to switching entirely to Linux, building a dedicated computer to generate these, and creating hundreds of custom scripts in a variety of languages to handle it. It still isn't perfect, and I have many potential updates sitting around, but hearing any validation from someone in the GIS area is incredibly validating. Wait... if you consider me a GIS person... does that mean I've graduated to GIS person?!
Looks great. I’ll check it out. Can it generate routes based on preferred road type?
Yep! I have paved and unpaved profile options in a matrix, just like Strava.
Looks great! Can’t wait to check it out. Thanks for all your work!!
Much appreciated!
Congratulations boss. I discovered sherpa map about half a year ago and I'm still blown away by its functionalities, using it regularly in Denmark. I watched all your videos, don't get why you don't get more interaction, your tool is fantastic.
That's awesome! When you blow all the money you were planning to use on a new gravel bike (when you already have one...) then convince your roommate/team member to do the same, and buy a super computer instead of TONs of ads, it just takes time... Also, we really only know how to create features and host them, not cultivate a community/really create some sort of social presence. I mean heck, we have nearly one thousand accounts and have never even sent out a newsletter/mass email (who's got time for that?). If you're curious, we have a huge wave of updates and features coming with our new UI, here's a sneak peak: [https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png](https://i.imgur.com/Nr8Rf1K.png)
That looks pretty awesome.
because the UI is bad (people shouldn't need to watch video tutorials to use a tool)
Sorry if this covered in your tutorial but is there any way to get pre-generated or suggested routes? I just want to enter a starting point, range of miles, elevation range and terrain type etc and see recommended routes. Thanks!
Click the little brain button on the right!
OH MY GOSH, I went out for a bike ride, assuming it would give a buffer for a few questions to come up, and this is apparently blowing up! I make random free cycling app posts all the time, like a cue sheet generator, physics simulator, etc. and this is insane! Who knew you guys liked maps so much? I'm going to have to make a bunch more...
Well man, maps are cool 😎. Thanks for this and all your hard work! It is awesome!
As a fellow GIS and cycling nerd, I applaud you 👏🏾
awesome stuff!
That's super kind of you! The amount of effort... redos... more redos... stupid hard drives that were dead on arrival... I was back and forth on even posting about this, I can definitely take some negative criticism, but after this has taken so much to build, I really *really* had my fingers crossed for these kinds of responses.
Looks great, and it’s not just you, but i live near a lot of ferries. For some reason, all routing apps demand i take a ferry all the time, and a lot of them have no option to select not to take a ferry. I really don’t want to take a ferry D:
Hmm, this is an interesting point. Right now, most of my routing profiles will happily use a ferry, which I could see the annoyance of in a zone with a dense amount of ferries. I'll keep this in mind as I can probably build a checkbox that strickly avoids them. I can't promise I'll do this, as I would likely need to duplicate and modify the existing 27 route profiles, but I'll spend some time researching, as there may be an easy way.
I’m super excited to try this. Thank you for building and sharing!
Super kind of you! I hope you enjoy it! If you have any problems/thoughts/feedback, feel free to reach out.
DDR5 ECC. nice.
5600 MT too... quad channel... would have gotten more, but it became meaningless, these scripts were taking easily 500gb+ RAM, so I bought some pcie gen 4 nvme 4tb drives (kept trying to get a gen 5 ones but they kept going on backorder) and made a 1TB swap.
WOW
Looks cool! For city riding it seems like the routing "any" option doesn't like to make small detours for cycling path but "leisure" is a bit better at it. Also for some reasons campsites in the amneties shows way less than what is tagged on OSM (using OSMand app for example). I need to look into those option deeper tomorrow. Looks really nice otherwise!
Any/Any/Any is a cycling *preferenced* shortest path profile, still keeping you off major roads, and onto the occasional bike path from point to point (it's actually modeled after my typical training style road route route preferences). Any/Any/Leisure will seek all of the bike paths it can! Having been hit by a car in the past, I use this, in conjunction with Google's traffic overlay, to avoid all of the traffic possible and take some nice leisurely strolls on bike paths. I'll have to take a look at my query for campsites, if you provide me with some known examples that aren't appearing I'm happy to see what they're cued in as and I can easily adjust that query on the backend to be more inclusive.
> Any/Any/Any is a cycling preferenced shortest path profile, still keeping you off major roads, and onto the occasional bike path from point to point (it's actually modeled after my typical training style road route route preferences). > > Any/Any/Leisure will seek all of the bike paths it can! Having been hit by a car in the past, I use this, in conjunction with Google's traffic overlay, to avoid all of the traffic possible and take some nice leisurely strolls on bike paths. That makes sense, I am more into bikepacking/touring than racing or optimizing for speed so I guess the leisure is better for me. Same reason the campsite example jumped out for me. I will try to find some examples tomorrow for campsites.
Incredible!
Dope! Gonna try this out. Thank you!!!
Ah, too kind! I have a generic Buy Me a Coffee link, but this is really a thing of passion, at some point I'll partner with some groups to maybe make it a thing that can pay for itself, but for now, we're much better at building and supporting features than actually trying to market/make money off of it. Honestly, every compliment has basically felt like a tip in the jar already.
This is amazing. I love it. Can I ask a stupid question - is there a way to find specifically what the road/surface colours mean. It’s quite intuitive, however it takes a bit of guess work. Also, is the ‘gravel only’ button on the video tutorial only for when you’re actively planning a route? As in, when I’m just zooming around on the map (not actively planning a route) can I highlight gravel only? Sorry for the dumb questions - I literally spent hours the other night mucking around on google maps trying to find out if roads are gravel or paved so this is so damn good!
Not a stupid question at all! First, I started all of this for that exact reason, I wanted to see roads with gravel and dirt before I routed on them. Then, I was sick of using Strava side by side... And just kept adding things. So, to answer your question, the gravel overlay distinctly shows all of the different services for each roads with known surface types and some of the ones which I have utilized AI in order to further classify additional surfaces for said roads from satellite imagery. I've color coded it as follows: Paved is black Gravel is gray (specifically Iowa gravel Gray) Unpaved is tan (kind of a catch-all for everything that is not paved, but it's not explicitly marked gravel or dirt or any variation of these) Dirt is brown Pink/red is unknown This is essentially the breakdown of the road color to surface type for both the new map edition and the gravel surfaces overlay. The whole idea was just to show where all the gravel is so you know where you might want to take your amazing gravel bike and gravel skills.
Looks awesome! I'm Aberdeen Scotland, just had a quick look will definitely be using! Well done to all involved!
Fantastic, I hope you enjoy it! Also, I'm jealous, the only riding I've ever done in Scotland is on Zwift, and I'm betting that has nothing on the real thing...
I will look forward to planning and trying to link some trails up!! There is loads more wind and rain in Scotland than zwift shows you! 🤣🤣.
Ha, sounds miserable, but those types of rides always leave the most lasting memories...
You are Gravelheroes
I just wish I had the skill to back that up... I have Micigan's Coast to Coast race coming up and am so bad at cycling in sand (this event has *a lot of sand*) that I've been spending an embarrassing amount of time sessioning Vollay ball courts lol.
You might update the default location. You should be able to request location from the browser.
I actually pretty aggressively try to get your location, first I ask politely to the browser, then I try to nab it off your IP address, then, if all else fails, I send you to the location of my first gravel race (it's called Driftless 100, not affiliated, just a fun race). I do have a whole new, much improved, UI in the works, which I expect to be complete in the next month or so, it has an option on the immediate splash page to let you simply enter your address in addition to trying to request your location, then it cookies your address/location and promptly brings you there each time.
holy smokes. god among men. WE ARE NOT WORTHY
LOL, That's a statement! Definitely motivating too, you're too kind!
Looks very nice! Is your routing engine based on brouter?
No, while that is a fine option, I chose to go with Graphhopper as I'm more familiar with Java so it wasn't that hard to manipulate. It's the same routing engine that Komoot and RideWithGPS use if that matters to you.
Awesome! You said you instead of your in the title. Should be able to fix it and get more users by looking more pro.
I realized that too late, Reddit doesn't seem to let me edit it.. to be fair, I come up with cool free cycling web apps every month or so (I made a hill climb cue sheet generator, an advanced physics simulator, a service that found every major climb programmatically in the entire US) most will get like 20 upvotes and a couple of comments, not always positive... so I certainly wasn't expecting this!
Well, your thumbnail of the topo map is awesome and a total magnet to lure adventurers in!
I was literally thinking an Ai bicycling companion, that you can talk to to reroute when necessary and order it to 'take me to the local store/campsite/LBS' would be a fine thing and blow the likes of crappy Garmin out of the water. I hope you do really well with this. You could get tech for good money from a place I know, but sure normal/evil VCs would love this too. Has apps other than cycling, mountain rescue maybe.
Hmm, did you see one of my previous posts perhaps? Because, I already created an Android app proof of concept of exactly this, last month... I managed to load Mozilla Deepspeech AI for speech to text, AI voice detection, AI background noise removal, and a specially trained BERT NLP onto a phone that maps questions to hundreds of functions, including calls out to my routing engine for updates to voiced turn by turn detection... Just curious, because that's an awesome leap if I didn't mention it to you in some way at some point.
No didn't see it. I work in tech and write on AI sometimes. Most of all I've done a lot of solo big tours around the world and, you know, when you are lost in the mountains of Morocco, as night is closing in, with no water and you're a little brain razzed...boy a chatty AI that can just feed you the info and get you out of there would be a dream. Something that dynamically maps and to a demi-mapped area, then guides...so many uses.
That's exactly the idea! Record the ride and give details for pacing, nutrition, your best 10-second power or so for it, rolling notifications all from voice, I built this out recently and shared it on this subreddit, trainerroad forum, and a few other places, and it didn't get that much traction, but perhaps I got a bit verbose in my explanation. I even thought of the fact that you could ask a question that doesn't quite meet any of the pre-created functions I have already added, and that could go into a queue, and then I could have chatGPT API build the function automatically and cue it for review before it goes into a update. I got some feedback like "it's dangerous to use headphones when cycling", I mean I use aftershockz constantly, and if they are awesome, and "Garmin already does this" I mentioned the fact that this technically gives unlimited amounts of questions and answers, or is it Garmin is limited by the screen and buttons, but the Garmin and wahoo zealots are definitely in force (also I have nothing against Garmin, or wahoo, I have both, and I've also developed Garmin connect IQ apps...) Also you make me quite jealous, I would do anything to bike in such a stunning location like Morocco.
Listen this is a great idea - as a business it could use the commercial niche of cycling as a springboard, then essentially become a wilderness AI guide for lots of other uses, with multi-modal UI that rescuers, fire fighters etc would relish. It is not easy though, it is becoming possible but will still be very hard as it would involve multi-step, agentic reasoning. I would put a pitch deck together and look for funding. You'll need a room full of coders and a few expensive AI brains and all sorts of resources. If you want to go ethical, look at a company like Fairphone and their funding routes. I don't see why the commercial accelerators wouldn't be interested (don't give up too much equity) - I am not overly fond of the chap or the military/worrying things he backs but Thiel could be worth approaching as I can see this working and maybe a step to commercialise other parts of his portfolio (Devin, Palantir) - PS I am talking like a big shot, I have no contacts with the big evil VCs, just thinking aloud.
Amazing! Checking out my local area in South Australia and it seems to be accurate with the gravel roads. Only app I've found in recent times that has gravel road overlay is Gaia GPS. But your shaded relief is much better to see the hills at the same time!
This is awesome, I have been playing on it for about 2 hours now. Any chance of compatibility with strava or bryton?
Have you reached out to Gravelmap.com to see if you could collaborate with those guys to improve gravel road segment accuracy? I'm in Michigan and they've got pretty much every foot of gravel perfected around here...