Soon after new dotted blue line feature available for us to contribute I wanted to do a Dotted Blue Line Meetup with fellow Local Guides. Therefor I planned this meetup at Udawalawa, Sri Lanka. My LG partner @ravindus and two other local guides @Chthuwa @SupunW joined me with this expedition.
I have prepared with couple of phone holders that can fix to windscreen to hold the phone steady during recordings. I did some trial recordings before the meetup to get idea of various factors and difficulties could arise during long drive recording. I noticed that if we keep the display turned on phone heats so fast and automatically stops recording. If this happened then we have to wait for some time to cool down to start recording again. I believe that due to tropical hot weather in Sri Lanka it is really difficult to keep phone below temperature while recording. I follow few methods to overcome this. I turned on AC of the car and kept on the windscreen blowers to full speed to cool down the phone while recording. I have to start the recording as soon as I open the app otherwise it will gives temperature warnings. I had to charger cable connected all the time to stop draining the battery so quick. I had to clean up the storage of the phone to get 3-4 hours of recordings in order to ensure capture nonstop for long time.
With all the preparation we left home in the morning. We fixed our phones on the dashboard to record the dive to Udawalawa. It took almost 4 hours of driving. We were manage to record all the way to Udawalawa more than 80km of dotted blue line in this journey.
We learned lots of new things about this new feature and shared our experiences with each other. I believe that this may be the first meetup held to draw dotted blue lines. At the end of the meetup we uploaded all the footages to Google Street View. I could add 80+km of dotted blue line to the map from this meetup only.
See the nice clip of SV recording at the Udawalawa DAM.
To see more meetup photos see this album.