The Fulcrum Focus

The importance of time
 

The Fulcrum Development Team will be out in full force at the FOSS4G-NA 2015 Conference in San Francisco next week! The conference has lined up some great keynote talks as well as an impressive session schedule. We are hoping to schedule an impromptu Birds of a Feather (BoF) session for anyone interested in mobile field data collection and we are always more than happy to chat Fulcrum at any time. I will be Tweeting from the @fulcrumapp account, so be sure to join us and monitor the #foss4gna hashtag to keep up with everything else.

Accessing child record history
And, just in case you want to know why being able to see child record history from parent root level history:

A little over a year ago I put together a CARTO Webhooks guide and wrote a short blog post on CARTO highlighting how to use our recently released webhook push notifications to push Fulcrum record updates to CARTO tables. This post caught the attention of our friends at CARTO, which got some conversations going and launched our close working relationship.

SpatialVideo captured in Fulcrum often contains a wealth of “mappable” information. Coleman previously blogged about extracting video features for mapping in OpenStreetMap and after recently rediscovering geojson.io, I wanted see if I could come up with a simple way of quickly mapping features discovered visually in geojson.io.

We have a lot of Fulcrum customers that work in the fields of engineering and architecture, and when designing and constructing facilities of any size, it is imperative to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act design standards. In researching ADA compliance, I used the New England ADA Center’s ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities form to build a custom ADA Fulcrum app. The New England ADA Center is one of ten members of the ADA National Network, and publishes the checklists. I found their checklists to be extremely comprehensive. Because Fulcrum is so flexible, it took me about 30 minutes to build most of the Priority 1 checklist. You can see how easy it is to use in the video below.

Back in November, Coleman blogged about using Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo as a tool for collecting OpenStreetMap features. Since releasing SpatialVideo functionality, we have captured quite a bit of video coverage, particularly around Spatial Networks headquarters in the Tampa Bay area.

NOTE: This feature has changed since 2015 and this blog post is out of date.
The Fulcrum platform is built on top of several excellent open source components, including Leaflet and Mapbox.js, and we support the open GeoJSON format as the de facto data standard for web mapping. Your Fulcrum data is always available in GeoJSON format as an export or via data shares, and the web map allows you to view GeoJSON files as additional map overlays.

Our Fulcrum team is continuously trying to push the limits of mobile collection technology and build what we learn into new capabilities to help our customers. I am always on the lookout for commercial or consumer products that our customers could use in tandem with Fulcrum. Recently while shopping at Home Depot, I came across the new Ryobi’s Phone Works devices which function on both iPhones and Android phones (compatibility list).

We’re working on building some integration tools using Zapier, a great service that allows Fulcrum data to be integrated or sent to other services based on specific triggers. Zapier has existing tools to integrate with services like Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Basecamp, and many more – or to do simple actions like send emails, SMS messages, or push notifications.

Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”

Fulcrum’s calculation fields enable some powerful collection capabilities. There can be many ways to configure and set them up, so this post provides some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your data collection workflow.

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.

Along with being able to share data collection surveys with field staff to collect data points, Fulcrum also has a powerful import tool for loading existing data into your account to send out to field, either for reference or for field workers to update. We put together a short how-to demo video showing how this can be done, using a shapefile to load some GIS data for editing.

Fulcrum customers worldwide are using the platform to collect a huge variety of data in the field, and the dynamic, adaptable nature of Fulcrum allows the flexibility to build the exact tool for the job. Today we’re introducing a new feature to extend this even further: Calculated Fields.

Getting the most out of ArcGIS™ with Fulcrum
Fulcrum already has a great import tool. Whether you’ve got shapefiles or CSV’s we’ve got you covered. We thought it would be nice to import data directly from an ArcGIS™ Server instance so we built fulcrum-ags-import.

While recently writing some software in JavaScript, I noticed a pattern. I would create an object, and then call init() on it. The instance needed some stuff done before I could use it.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

Customizing Fulcrum photo options on Android
Our latest release of Fulcrum for Android (2.10.0), is adding photo quality options to the settings. This option can be used to scale images taken at the device’s full resolution down to a smaller size. Working with smaller images can significantly improve a number of things (storage usage on the device and server, synchronization times) without having a negative impact on your data.

2014 was an exciting year for Spatial Networks and Team Fulcrum! Looking back at our accomplishments over the past twelve months, it’s clear that Fulcrum has really matured into a stable, feature-rich platform, which is fast becoming the go-to solution for structured geographic data collection. We have a dedicated and diverse customer base who are using Fulcrum all across the globe, in ways we never could have imagined and 2015 is looking to be another exciting year!

During December 11 and 12, Bryan and I joined CARTO in New York City for their CartoDB14 partner event.

Every day we find new customers using Fulcrum for wildly different applications for field data collection. Nothing is more exciting as an engineer than to see something you’ve built being used to solve real challenges, all over the world. However, as a fast-moving, agile software team faced with an enormous variety of use cases—sometimes with directly opposite requirements—you can’t build everything (nor should you).

The Fulcrum platform has grown tremendously over the past few years, and while we continue to add new features and integrations, the primary task of Fulcrum remains- to enable users to quickly and easily build structured data collection solutions. Our goal is to remove the technical hurdles typically associated with developing a robust mobile data collection solution, so that anyone can collect accurate, timely data, which ultimately provides the foundation for sound decision making.

Identify records at a glance from list or map view
In our recent update last week, in which we announced support for barcode/QR code scanning, we also made some additional modifications to make it easier to identify records at a glance when looking at the list or map views on Fulcrum for iOS and Android.

Like many companies who employ off-site team members, Spatial Networks brings everyone together a few times a year for a week of handshakes, hugs, good food, and better beer. Amazingly, some code usually gets shipped as well. Our most recent visit was punctuated by a long awaited change of venue as we moved into our new, custom-designed space, leaving behind an office that never quite felt like home. These visits are important for a variety of reasons, but here are a few that stand out to me each time we have a meeting of the remotes. Here’s a recap of what got done:

Fulcrum update – In-App Barcode and QR Code Scanning
Fulcrum is already flush with data types that you can build into your own custom data collection apps for field surveying. Many Fulcrum users have deployed Fulcrum for asset inventory and evaluation projects, with service technicians or inspectors tracking asset locations and conducting quality inspections.

Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to Fulcrum account owners in order to better understand what our customers enjoy about Fulcrum, what they dislike, and how we can make their experience better. Suffice it to say, we learned a lot.

Adam Rose, PE, GISP, CFM has several letters after his name, but is nonetheless fairly lazy: he enjoys creating and automating software and hardware to make the lives easier for environmental engineers and others in the water profession. In his spare time he is a product manager at XP Solutions, a software company.

At its core, Fulcrum is a business productivity platform focused on making field operations more productive by providing tools for speeding up the data capture process, and enhancing data quality across the board.

OpenStreetMap editing is typically centered around tracing, meaning digitizing features on top of satellite imagery to extract things like roads, buildings, landuse areas, coastlines, and other visible features. The data made available by providers like Bing for OSM tracing is fantastic for creating the basic foundational elements.

Update for 2023:
We are thrilled to announce that Fulcrum has entered into a definitive Commercial Provider agreement with Esri™ to leverage their technology stack. This partnership brings together the leading solution for field inspections and data collection with the top geographic information systems (GIS) platform, which is used by clients in virtually every industry that requires location-related data, mapping, and analysis.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly customizing your mobile apps.

Fulcrum was designed from the ground up to support full offline usability, but we are proud to extend support of custom online tile servers to our mobile clients as well. The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps now list all of your Tile XYZ layers in the mobile layer selector, right along with your custom offline layers.

In addition to the recently released Map Embed feature, we’ve just open sourced a simple template for building responsive web applications, powered by Fulcrum data shares. This template wraps the Bootstrap framework and Leaflet mapping library into a fullscreen, mobile-friendly map application with a responsive navbar, searchable & sortable sidebar, and modal info windows. You can configure the app Title and provide your own logo or icon, in addition to defining which fields you want to expose and whether the markers should be clustered or not.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.

Using Data Shares for Map Embeds in Fulcrum
Data Shares make it easy to publicly share data collected in your Fulcrum apps in formats like CSV, KML and GeoJSON. We just launched a new feature that makes sharing your data even easier – Map Embeds.

Last month, I attended the 8th annual CFGIS Workshop in Orlando with fellow Spatial Networks employees Andie Dodd and Bryan McBride. The event brought together Central Florida’s GIS enthusiasts from the public and private sectors, as well as many national vendors. At the conference, I observed that local governments are making a huge push to publish their GIS data on publicly available web maps. I have a few reflections on this topic and can suggest a tool to help create a great end product.

When we first started to build Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo features, we had to do a lot of testing. In the beginning, testing revolved around holding a device and capturing video while sitting in a passenger seat, or precariously setting a phone on the dashboard. Not only does this require the time of two people to collect video, but can also result in unstable, shaky video data. Since one person driving and filming is not only dangerous, but can get you a ticket, we started testing out different mount devices to see what worked best.

In the past few weeks my colleagues have showcased examples of how applications can be built on top of Fulcrum, utilizing our open source libraries and the Fulcrum API:

Fulcrum provides a powerful API for taking advantage of programmatic access to many of Fulcrum’s features. With the API, you can do things like create records and photos, update apps and choice lists, and delete webhooks. The RESTful API is easy to interface with, but there are a few language-specific wrappers that make things even easier.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent five years working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a Geospatial Coordinator. My days were spent collecting data pertaining to specific disasters, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps which were then used in decision-making by senior leadership at FEMA and in state governments.

So the hotly anticipated Apple Watch is now a reality. Many thought Apple might do something drastically different, but they didn’t — their device looks surprisingly similar to prior art in the space from Google and Samsung. It’s a watch with a few productivity functions beyond timekeeping, has almost none of its own onboard sensors (save the HealthKit and activity tracking sensors), and not-too-impressive battery life. The physical constraints of the wristband form factor don’t provide space for making significant innovation beyond the territory of their competitors at this point. If they made it super slim, it’d have less battery life and no sensors. The face can’t be too big, but needs to be big enough to interact with buttons and text. To do anything cool you need radios and sensors, which make it bigger. Marco Arment covers these engineering and design tradeoffs in his excellent write up.

Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.

One of the keystones of the Fulcrum platform is extensibility. Rather than locking users into a monolithic ecosystem of proprietary formats and fixed workflows, we’ve built Fulcrum to be easily accessible and customizable. From cross-platform support to open data formats, our goal is to make Fulcrum the go-to field data collection platform for professional organizations as well as individual projects.

Many Fulcrum users are working indoors, conducting facility inspections of inside spaces. Within large facilities there may be multiple floors and hundreds of rooms to visit to inspect equipment, perform quality checks of plumbing and electrical, or observe the quality of build-outs for future repairs. Even though these types of work happen indoors without access to accurate GPS signals, you can still use Fulcrum’s mapping capabilities to geolocate your data on a reference background.

We recently received an inquiry from our friends at Code For America who suggested designing an app for documenting trailhead information which would be compatible with their new Open Trail System Specification. The OpenTrails initiative seeks to “provide a uniform exchange format for publishing machine readable data on the extent, attributes, and use of our nation’s trail systems”. The goal is to help facilitate the open exchange and use of trail data between various stakeholders, including data stewards, trail managers, government agencies, and public users.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum web interface include some exciting new features and enhancements. The most prominent change is the new “App Dashboard” page. We’ve streamlined the main Fulcrum landing page, moving the administrative tools to the new App Dashboard page and making the core tools more prominent. Clicking on the app name now takes you to the App Dashboard page, where you can access the administrative tools along with a high level snapshot of activity within that particular app.

The onboard GPS hardware built into consumer smartphones has improved immensely over the years, along with the software technology to help augment positional accuracy automatically using other sources of data, like cellular and Wi-Fi signals. Users of Fulcrum frequently ask about our experiences with the built-in GPS antennae on iPhones, iPads, and the myriad of Android devices available to find out what sorts of positional accuracy and precision they can expect to get using different flavors of hardware. There’s also a growing universe of 3rd-party aftermarket devices that can be paired to smartphones or tablets using Bluetooth, allowing users to override the onboard device readings or add new capabilities not otherwise available out of the box.

Fulcrum data shares provide shareable URL’s for taking your dynamic field data via standard formats, including CSV, KML, and GeoJSON. This ability to stream your data, in real time, to a variety of clients opens up countless integration opportunities. Any application that can consume a web accessible file in one of the supported formats should now be compatible with your custom Fulcrum app.

Hyperlink Fields
Another new feature with the latest release of Fulcrum is the introduction of a new field type to add to your apps: Hyperlink fields. Hyperlinks allows you to store URLs to any desired path right alongside a record within your app, in order to link to content outside of Fulcrum data. Links can be used in all sorts of different ways to do interesting things during your data collection projects, like linking to web addresses, or content paths on your own server. Using Hyperlink fields, viewing a record containing a URL allows your field user to tap and open those URLs associated with each piece of data. In this post, I’ll outline some of the basic setup information of how to use Hyperlinks, and show an example of exactly what’s possible.