Bigfoot ()

Bigfoot is a web app that traces the places you've been to, your road trips and your flights on a map.

• Bigfoot uses the location history data that can be obtained from Google Maps.
• The data is then processed into a format that the frontend data can consume.
• The frontend reads this processed data and renders it in a map.

Visualizing your own location history

Follow the given steps to set up your own bigfoot visualization.

Step I: Download data

Download the location history data from your Google Maps account. Check out this HowTo article to learn how to do that.

Copy the downloaded location history folder to the data/ directory, so it looks like:

|data
   |location_history
      |2021
      |2020
      ...

Step II: Process Data

cd backend/
python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python data_generator.py
cd ..

Step III: Configure visualization

Update config.json with necessary configuration changes.

IMPORTANT: Please update the API keys by creating your own accounts at Mapbox and Stadia Maps. The API keys in the file are domain-restricted and will not work for you.

Update visitedStates.json with the states you've visited. TODO: Automatically get it from location history. (I didn't want to count states that I've had a layover at as "visited")

Step IV: Serve

Serve the webpage from the root bigfoot/ directory using python http server.

python -m http.server 3000

Open your browser and go to localhost:3000

Deploying to github pages

Fork the repo. Follow all the steps above to visualize your data. Push the updated data (flights.json, places.json, road_trips.json, config.json and visitedStates.json) to github. Be careful not to push your location history to a public github repository.

Activate github pages for your repository by following steps from this article. You'll then have your bigfoot hosted at username.github.io/bigfoot.

Disclaimer

The project still is under-development. I plan to update the service to be more user friendly and plug-n-play so that people with no coding skill can set it up. Stay tuned!