/borderdistance

For calculating the distance to the Canada-US border

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Border Distance Calculator

A working instance of this project is served at twitchard.github.io/borderdistance

Aberdeen, SD is 394.393 km from the Canadian border, whereas Mt. Prospect, IL is 397.238 km

This project is a javascript application written with sveltejs for calculating and comparing distances from geographic locations to the US-Canada border. Distances are determined by modeling the Earth as an oblate spheroid according to the specifications of the WGS 84 standard. The project makes use of the GeographicLib library by Charles Karney, and the gmaps.js library by Gustavo Leon.

To Build

Nodejs 6+ is required to build. If this is not the system nodejs, I recommend nvm.

First, see instructions below for downloading a map -- No GeoJSON is included in this repo

nvm use 6
npm install
npm run build

This will build the website into the dist/ subdirectory. Serve the files there using any method of your liking. If you have python2, here is a one-liner

cd dist/
python2 -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

To use a different border

First, acquire GeoJSON describing the border that interests you. There are several countries in the public domain available at AshKyd's geojson-regions project. Put it in maps/geojson/YOUR_MAP.json

You will then need to preprocess the geojson to calculate the border "segments" and their length.

cat maps/geojson/YOUR_MAP.json | node scripts/process.js > maps/segments/YOUR_MAP.json

Then, modify the PATH_TO_MAP constant in src/app.html to point to maps/segments/YOUR_MAP.json. Build the project, and it should use the new map!