GeoCaching tools in Python

Rationale

This project started from the sad fact that there is no official Garmin browser plugin for Linux.

Most modern Garmin devices can be connected to a Linux PC and will be automatically recognized as a mass storage device and mounted.

These tools can download information about geocaches from the geocaching.com website and save it in Garmin-recognizable .gpx files. You can copy these files to your navigator, unmount and disconnect it from your Linux PC and enjoy paperless geocaching experience.

Installation and configuration

You will need the following python libraries installed:

• lxml (Fedora package python-lxml).
• BeautifulSoup (Fedora package python-BeautifulSoup).

You can install all these under Fedora Linux using this command:

sudo yum install -y python-lxml python-BeautifulSoup

The project itself requires no special installation steps. To configure run any of the scripts once to create the configuration directory ($HOME/.config/geocaching-py/). Launch your editor and create a file $HOME/.config/geocaching-py/login containing a single line with your geocaching.com account login and password separated by a semicolon, like this:

harrypotter:topsecret

These tools do not require premium membership account, a free account is sufficient.

You are now ready to use the applications.

Applications

save-gpx.py

Save information about a geocache to a gpx file with auto-generated file name. Accepts any number of geocache IDs (like GCxxxx) or GUIDs (long sequences numbers seen after guid= on geocache page URLs).

The file would have a name of GCXXXXX.gpx where GCXXXX is the geocache ID. For example, this command:

./save-gpx.py GC26BXM ac4169d7-314d-432a-804b-5109a6bd350e

would create two files, GC26BXM.gpx and GC2CW2B.gpx, containing information about Duck and Cover and A Yarn in the Hand geocaches.

save-for-address.py

Find geocaches around a given address within the given radius, print their listing and save information about geocaches. The first argument for the command should be the radius of search in km. The rest of the command line is concatenated into an address, so the following two commands provide identical results:

./save-for-address.py 100 Palo Alto, CA
./save-for-address.py 100 "Palo Alto, CA"

This command is interactive. It will first display a number of geocaches and number of search results pages found for your address and ask for a number of caches you would like to download. The search results are usually sorted by distance from your point of search, so it is often not necessary to download all caches available. Please note, that the number of search results include also archived and disabled caches, which would NOT be downloaded by this tool.

Enter the number of caches to download or just hit enter to download all caches and wait. All available caches matching your query will be downloaded and saved in gpx files in your current directory.

Author

This software is written by Lev Shamardin <shamardin@gmail.com>. Feel free to contact me on any related questions.