Stream points at regular intervals

[AlfredBaldenweck]

This came up in conversation with one of my users the other day.

It would be really useful to walk an arbitrary line and drop a point at a regular interval, such as every 5 feet or every 20 seconds. This would be great for like, setting up test units when you get to the field.

You can kind of do this by just walking a line, but the problem is that you just get a line when what you really care about is the vertices.

Being able to just stream points (of any point template, so you could then fill out the information from your test pit or something) would make field work a lot more dynamic and require less preparation in the office.

[RPGIS]

Hi @AlfredBaldenweck,

I think the capability already exists, at least last time I checked. In field maps you can specify the interval to drop vertices, if it is a line, or points at regular intervals. You would just need to set in in field maps as part of the collection settings.

I don't know which version of enterprise supports it but in AGO it is possible.

[AlfredBaldenweck]

You can set the stream interval using the collection settings button, but for points there isn't any option to actually stream the way that there is for lines or polygons

[ColinLawrence]

@AlfredBaldenweck Can you tell us more about your workflow and how you would use streaming of point features? What do you mean by "test pit"?

There is a tool in Pro that you could run to convert the vertices from a line into point features: Feature Vertices To Points (Data Management toolbox)

[AlfredBaldenweck]

That tool is good to have, but this is explicitly for use in the field.

Unfortunately, I can't remember which user suggested this, so I'm going to have to spitball a usecase here.

For example:

I go out to the field and find a new archaeological site and decide that I need to do shovel testing at regular intervals (5 meters, for example) to determine if there's anything subsurface. Being a new site, I'm unable to plan that ahead of time, and going back to the office is a waste of my time. If I could walk a transect and drop points as I go, I can flag them out as I walk, then go back and dig. It also saves me the trouble of having to keep track of my pace size, and worrying that my seasonal hire is actually counting his pace correctly.

Another use case is our Realty staff have to do a vegetation analysis. Similar to the usecase above, it involves walking a transect, then at regular intervals looking down and writing down the ground cover. First stop: Bare rock, third stop: noxious weeds, 10th stop: grass. (This may sound like a QuickCapture workflow, but I'm really looking for the specific interval)

Maybe I want to line out everyone's starting places before we walk a transect and don't want to have them pace it out or give them a coordinate to stand on. If we all have the same feature class on our map, I can just walk and stream the points and they can look at their devices to find their spots.

Having the phone decide where they're going to stop means that we have more consistent and reliable data, and that we don't have to do anything in the office before or afterwards to massage the data into a usable format, such as grabbing vertices from lines, especially when like, I really am trying to collect data into a specific schema.

I noticed that both of the first two usecases outlined here kind of assume walking to the end of whatever you're doing and then returning to the points to fill in the attributes (how deep did you get? did you find anything?). I think another possible execution of this would be to automatically pause and force you to fill out that point's attributes before continuing.

[ColinLawrence]

Thank you for these details and use cases

>Having the phone decide where they're going to stop means that we have more consistent and reliable data

What sort of devices are you using? Unless you are using high accuracy GPS to record and also to navigate to existing points, then there will be a level of error introduced. A phone by itself is only accurate about 2 meters at best

[AlfredBaldenweck]

Depends on the team, honestly. Some teams are using external receivers that get down to 50cm, others down to centimeter. Others are just using the straight phone. 

I personally wouldn't worry about error specifically in this case; error is inherent to the collection method anyway.

[ColinLawrence]

We appreciate the details @AlfredBaldenweck