I am wondering if there commercially exists a Digital Point Description Collector. Modern Data Collector is too complicated to learn for a high school grad. Dealing with figure field codes, all the COGO routines, and all the inverse functions are not generally straightforward tasks for them.
This idea comes up for a survey crew of 3 or 4. One instrument man, 2 rod men, and 1 recorder. This is the usual setup for a topo project in an area where peace/order/safety is a concern. The idea is to finish the work as fast as possible to greatly reduce survey crew's site exposure. Thus, 1 recorder is allocated for the job. His/her work is the good old days style of jotting down point descriptions in a paper notebook. Providing them the modern data collector does not actually help in this type of scenario. The learning curve is too long for them if not asymptotic.
For this reason, I am interested for a simple Digital Point Description Collector. Its functionality is just for the notes. Is this commecrcially available? Any ideas?
Thank you.
Replies
Mmmm I would do this if there is a long description on each point:
Record the description in any digital sound recorder (you know first the point code name, number, then the description) and try a decoder sofware that works transforming the voice into text.
You will get something like a text indexed archive, for example if you say:
point 12 comma corner 44 description blue house north east
point 13 comma top 3 description grass north
sounds like military but if you look carefully that can be transformed into text and then:
12,corner44,blue house north east
13,top3,grass north
take this to excel and you got a database linked with your total station data by number or name.
Try wave to text or voice to text, I have used one of those time ago but can´t remember which was.
It worked for simple text inside my office, you should try outside with background noise, traffic etc.
Good luck
What I am really interested in is a data collection system for non-techy or non-engineers. Learning the complexities of modern data collection system is too much for them. For this reason, I am wondering if there commercially exists a data recorder that simply records point description.
As a minor alternative: program some other mobile device (palm, ipod, etc) in case that is cheaper or easier than using a mobile phone. Or even use a pocket calculator.
In the early days of data loggers, some programmable calculators were cheaper than data loggers, so were used instead.