Know Your Holes | Episode 2: Revolutionize The Way You Manage Waypoints

(upbeat music) - Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Know Your Holes with Omni-Efficient. I'm Chase CSRE here at Omni-E and I'm joined with Dan Wick, one of our co-founders and CTO. I've been super excited about ever since I started here and we couldn't be more excited to give it to you now. So we shot a couple videos ahead of time, but we just wanted to kind of discuss and let you know kind of some of the bigger features that are going on with the system here. - Yeah, so thanks Chase. So like Chase was saying, Wave Points has been a feature we've been working on for a while. Some of the most recent developments that we've had have been around the ability to take existing wave points and wave points that you may have created in one of your index units. So we now support the ability to import wave points. And I think some of the videos go into the details of that. But one of the big benefits of using Omni-Efficient is to put your wave points into not only if you create them from the app or from the website of Omni-Efficient. If you import them as a pro member, you'll be able to associate all the conditions for that wave point on the actual timestamp that it was created going back to 2011. So anything that was created from 2011 on, we have the ability to give you full range of conditions for that exact wave point, the latitude and longitude for that. So everything from the basic weather information, air temperatures, wind, pre-sip, cloud cover, and then some really interesting things around barometric pressure. And then obviously moon positioning. So you get a lot of information when you bring your wave points in. So not only do you get to manage them better, but then you enrich them with all bunch of whole bunch of data around the conditions. In addition to having the ability to understand what lake it was on to. So once you get your wave points into Omni-Efficient, not only enriches the capabilities of what the wave points have, it also makes them a lot easier to manage. So we're really excited about it. We invest a lot of time and effort to making sure that we had a good source of weather data to be able to bring all of the details for the wave points that you bring in. So there is no limit to importing, even if you're an Afro, but if you are a pro, that's when the magic kind of turns on with all these conditioned data. So the conditions is what really got me kind of fired up about this whole waypoint management system. I've never seen anything out there where I can go in there, filter my waypoints to say a south wind, a north wind, whatever the conditions are gonna be that I'm gonna go fishing at the next day. And I've got the ability to filter my waypoints down, declutter everything to kind of fit that exact conditions that I'm looking for or going to be fishing it. So this is something that's just kind of mind blowing to me to be honest with you. - Right, it's beyond my capabilities of really being able to kind of comprehend it to be honest with you. - Yeah, and what's cool is that as you create wave points, whether it's from importing or creating them from the app or from the website, is that once you've got them created and managed, you can pull it up in the desktop, logged in, move them around, edit them, clean them up. I mean, if you stamp out a bunch on the device that you didn't perfect at the time, you can do that. And then what's cool is then it sinks right back to your app when you're either on the go or in the boat as well. So, and then the other thing is that the ability to export, you could do a lot of organization of your waypoints, you can then export those out, and then there's support for the major manufacturers to import those in. And we're hoping that in talking to the manufacturers as we get more of this going, that we'd be able to even provide some of the data enrichment that we have there. So that's a little bit down the road yet in terms of like being able to get all that cool conditions data into your unit as well. But at a minimum, you can use Omnia's system to help you see it on the big screen. It's web-based, you don't have to have any software installed to do it other than the app on the phone, but on the web, on your desktop, you can make edits, you can reposition, you can clean them up at a photo, all sorts of different things. And then once you've got things in a good shape, you can then create, like Chase was saying, a filter or a subset of filters, but then give you something you can save and say like, these are all my way points for this, like on this day of these conditions, and then export it. And then you know when you get those, that export on to an SD card or to your device through Bluetooth, you can get it back to your in-dash unit and it works pretty slick. - So you're mentioning down the road, I mean, we could be looking at not even having to use SD card, it's very units period. - Yeah, I think as these manufacturers create better and better apps, you know, they're supporting, I mean, this is a common pain point that people have of like the manual hardware doing that. They have an SD card reader and a computer and all that stuff. So I think as these apps get better and better, and there's a couple of the big guys out there that are doing a good job with this, that once you've created a Bluetooth connection to your in-dash unit from the manufacturer app, then Omni is app, so if you have the both apps on your phone, it's a seamless integration, app to app to just export, import, and then the manufacturer app interfaces with the device in your boat, and it should be then thinking better and better. And so that technology's come a long way in the last six months for the manufacturer, so we're really excited to keep partnering with the manufacturers to make sure that all the capabilities of syncing, they can focus on doing that, and then we can help make the data as good as possible. As an angler, I can't tell you how huge that will be. Yeah, I mean, for the last 10 years, I've been backing up all my waypoints on my old college laptop. I have to cross my fingers every time I turn on the power button, they'll actually fire up and turn on. And now I've got all my waypoints, as long as I have access to the internet, I don't even need my phone. Right, right, I can access my waypoints from Dan's phone, I can access them from Kip's phone. It just amazes me that it's come this far. Yeah, I think he had like 7,000 or something in your account or something. Yeah, yeah. So that's cool, 'cause I think that's the cool thing too, is like, you know, stuff fighters in the office the other day, and he has, you know, hundreds of SD cards over the years of things, and so we were showing him out, we could now just take those SD cards, pull waypoints off of those, you know, not have to have a little tiny label in your SD card to know which lakes those are from, what time period they're from, bring it all into Amiya, and then you can just make a lot more sense of them. So the workflow I think is gonna be really good for people. And I'm thinking about how beneficial it is for me, just fishing the lakes here in Minnesota. For a guy like Seth, it's traveling, this is enormous, right? Yeah, yeah, so if you're, you know, you're going on a trip somewhere, I think Seth had a deforter to practice, and it's like, you know, we can get all of this, the waypoints set up a filter just for Florida, just Rokitrobi or whatever, and then take those, put it on a new SD card that he knows has those, and then get that right into the in-dash unit. And then again, like you were saying, eventually then the SD card part of it could get out of the picture as the connection between the manufacturer app and the device gets better, and Ami is ready to go to, the app is ready to interface with all the major apps. So it's cool. - That's awesome. - So why don't we kick into some of the videos, showing you some of the details, and kind of explaining how to import your waypoints into the platform. We've got videos showing you how to get it from Lorentz units, Hummingbird units, Garmin exports directly to GPX, so there's really, I mean, they make it super easy. And we've got videos kind of explaining how you can filter through the conditions, and then save those filters and export them. Hope you enjoy. Typically I've got my waypoints stored on SD cards and just throw them in a waterproof Plano box in the boat. It does the job, but it's not great. I need to get better about backing them up. In this new Amniya system, we've got for waypoint management is awesome. So I'm gonna show you guys how you can get your waypoints from your Hummingbird units right to the Amniya platform, and you can be able to view them on the computer, your phone, a tablet, wherever you are. It's great. So we'll take our first chip here. I got my SD card, and I need some kind of a thumb drive to get it into my computer. So we load the thumb drive in, and that brings up the file. If you open the file, you're gonna notice that these waypoints come in an HWR format. In order for these to be loaded onto the Amniya platform, they need to be saved into a GPX format. Luckily Hummingbird PC, which is free to download, does this automatically. So what I do is I open my Hummingbird PC, I've got the chip right there up at the upper left-hand corner. I'm just gonna go ahead and download from SD to PC. That downloaded the file, and you can see it highlighted right below. And you can also see that this saved it automatically right into a GPX format. I didn't have to do any other work. It did it right there for me. It's got my waypoints listed out. So now I've got it in this file. I need still need to get it to a place where I can send it or I can upload it. So I'm gonna save this as, and I'm just gonna save it as my desktop, or to my desktop, and I'm gonna give it a file name. This happens to be "Malax." Save it to the desktop. Now, I've got the file on my computer. I can go right to my Omnia page here. I'm already logged into my Pro account. I go to the map. And you slide over and you have to select waypoints. I've been loading quite a few waypoints this morning, so the system's taking a little bit to load here. There we go. All right, now we got this up. Scroll down, you get, see you got these three buttons at the bottom of the waypoint file. Create, import, or export. I want to import. I'm gonna import a file. And this was directly from my desktop. So I'm gonna select desktop. And then I'm gonna find that file name that I just labeled. And that was just the regular "Malax" file right there. So I'm gonna select that, open. (sighs) Loads the waypoints right there for you. And you can click submit waypoints. I'm not gonna click it because I have already loaded these particular waypoints onto my file, or onto my platform already. But you click submit waypoints. And those waypoints are automatically going to appear on your map for you. So that was "Malax" we loaded up. There they are. So that's how you upload them from a computer to the Omnia platform via the website. You can also do this right on your phone. Again, you have to get the file to your phone. So we have the file still on our desktop. And an easy way to do this is simply email it to yourself. So I'm gonna email it to Chase at Omnia Fishing. Attach a file. Again, find that "Malax" file that we just created. Select that, open it. And now I've emailed that to myself. So now I'm gonna get onto my phone and open up my email. There it is. Relaxed GPX. So I'm gonna download that. To my phone. And then I can go to the Omnia app. Waypoints. Again, import. This time it's up top. Add a file to the import. There's my "Malax" GPX. Select that. And waypoints have successfully been uploaded. And you'll notice, again, I've already got a bunch of waypoints on here. But those waypoints transferred immediately from the desktop in the web to my phone on the app. So I can view it on my phone. And I can also look at this on a tablet if I really wanna get a bigger screen with all of the mapping options. So it's a lot of cool features coming here with this. This is Hummingbird. We got a couple more videos coming your way on how to do this with Lorentz and Garmin. And it's gonna get even easier with phone to phone app to app applications coming in the near future. So stay tuned. First thing you're gonna need is a micro SD card for Lorentz. When you're exporting your waypoints from Lorentz, they give you a few file formatting options. The default option is a V6 or version six. This is what most people export their waypoints at. This is gonna come out as a USR file format. The other option, the easier option for us here at Omnia, is if you export your waypoints at a GPX format. That's the file format we need for you to upload the waypoints. So Lorentz makes that super easy. If you export them at the GPX format, it's ready to go. If you did not export them in the GPX format and you exported them at the USR, which most people do, that's okay. We still have a way that's pretty easy to convert those over. So you can see in my thumb drive, just uploaded all of the files that I've exported. I've got a USR file and then I also, for simplicity, exported the GPX file. But again, I wanna show you how to work with this USR file if you already have these on your desktop. I'm gonna take that from my thumb drive and I'm gonna copy that over to my desktop. Again, you can see that's a USR file. So to convert that, there is something called GPS Babble. This is free to download. I just downloaded this myself, just started playing with it, and it's pretty user-friendly. So what we gotta do, we open that up, first thing we want is our input. What are we gonna be putting in there? We're gonna be putting in a USR file. So we're gonna scroll down, and there it is, Laurent's USR. So that's our file type. Now we select our actual file. Got it on my desktop. Laurent's USR. Go ahead and open that. That'll pull it up and again, our input. Now what do we wanna get out of this? We wanna GPX file that we will be able to put into Omnia. So again, we select our file type. We're gonna scroll down until we find GPX. Go ahead and select that. For file name, this is what we are gonna name our new file. So we'll just go to Laurent's new. Again, it's saving as a GPX. And I'm just gonna save this to my desktop. And then click OK to run it. Translation successful. And there's my new GPX file right there. So again, if you exported your waypoints from your Laurent's unit as a GPX file, you can skip that whole step. You can just take the GPX file right off of your microSD card and it's good to go. So now we've got a usable file. Open our Omnia page. We are on the map. Go over and select waypoints. And once you get your waypoint menu pulled up, at the bottom you can click Import, Import File. And see we've got our USR and then we've got our GPX. We want to make sure we are selecting the GPX file. Submit waypoints. And there you go. You can see they populated the map over on the right there. And here's what's so great about this. This is not just saved onto your computer here. This is saved here Omnia Account. So not only can you access this on your computer, I can access this right on my phone on the app too. So we've got Lake Waconia pulled up here. And you can see the waypoints have not shown up quite yet. So you're gonna go down, click the waypoint menu, slide that up, and then you're just gonna give a quick swipe down. And you can see that something changed there. And now my waypoints are right on my app. So I have access to these waypoints now on any computer, any phone, any tablet, any kind of platform where you can sign on to your Omnia account. So I can play with these at work. I can play with these at home. I have access everywhere with these. Tune in for the next episode so we can show you some cool features on how to filter these, how to export them, and all the really cool features that we got coming. I've shot a couple of clips earlier showing you how to get your waypoints loaded up into the platform. So in this clip, I want to demonstrate and focus on how to filter, how to edit, how to share these waypoints once you've got them into the platform itself. So as you can see, I'm focused on Lake Millex right now. It's a popular Lake here in Minnesota. A bunch of us fish it all the time. We've got waypoints kind of circling the whole thing here. So again, just giving you a quick demonstration of kind of the features and some of the stuff that sets our waypoint management system apart from some of the others that are coming out right now. So again, as you can see, I've got my waypoints loaded into the system. I'm on my desktop here. I've logged into my pro account. My waypoints are displayed. The first thing I want to show you guys is the filtering features that we've got now. This is where it kind of sets us apart from some of the other waypoint management systems that are out there. First, we've got the ability to filter your waypoint by type icon, as what most people call it. We are in the midst of improving the selection of icons. So don't worry. Your icon will stay true to what you saved it as. It does not get lost in our system. It just does not display currently. That will be fixed, I promise you. But you can filter by waypoint type. We can filter by water body. Right now I want to focus on the lacks. So I'm going to get rid of all these other waypoints and just select my my lacks waypoints. You can see the results have changed. Scroll back up and minimize that. Back in filter or add a filter on dates. So if we select, let's say, relax is a great fall lake. We'll go October 1st to October 31st. And you can see my results are slimming down even more. And now, here's where it really gets fun. All of your weather conditions, going back I think 11 years, are attached to these waypoints as soon as you enter them into the Omnia platform. You can now filter your waypoints by the weather conditions. So let's say we're going up, again we're going to relax. I'm planning a fall trip. I know I kind of want to fish that east, southeast side of the lake. That's where I tend to have most of my luck. So I'm going to try and pick a day that has a wind out of that direction. This is a big lake. You don't want to go out there to the southeast side with the northwest wind. You're going to be bouncing all over the place. Wind speed. I'm going to select lower wind speeds again, big lake. I don't want to be out there on a super windy day. Cloud cover, those smallies like it bright and clear. Sunlight to help them see the bait that they're chasing. We've got the barometric pressure attached to this. You can pick a medium barometric pressure, a high barometric pressure, and the barometric trend. I'm not very versed on the barometric stuff. I've got to get better at that. That's why I'm super excited this is on here. I can start building trends off of some of this stuff. Right now I'm just going to leave that blank. Show your results and see all my icons and waypoints disappeared except for the ones that I want to focus on for this fall trip to Milaax. This cleans up your map so much. It makes it so much easier, more efficient to pick where you want to focus your energies, where you want to spend your time on the water when you want to go to the lake. If you created one of these filters, you can actually save this for later. We're going to call this an October Milaax. Save it. Anytime I want to plan a trip to Milaax in the fall, I've got that saved filter right in my system and can pull it up right away. It makes it super efficient. There you go, back to the fall Milaax displayed. That's a quick rundown on filtering. All of these features that I just showed you are also available right on the app as well. I'm just displaying this on a desktop as that's where I'm more comfortable. I'm at the office. This is what I'm playing with more often. Again, all these features are available in the app. The only differences that you're going to see in the features are when we selected our outing date. This date that we selected October 1 through October 31 is going to kick back that date range for all years. So whether it's 2020, 2021, 2022, whenever you made that icon between those dates, that is going to display on the map. On the app, you actually have the option to select a specific year. So if you only want to see one or two years, you don't care what you caught in the fall five years ago, you can actually select the specific year and the specific date , helping you to narrow it down a little bit more. All right, now that we've shown you how to filter your waypoints, we also have the ability to edit waypoints within the system here. And again, you can do this on the app. You can do this on mobile web and you can do this on a desktop. So anywhere you can connect to the internet, you can edit, you can access your waypoints. It's a great, great feature to have. So I'm just going to select a waypoint here kind of at random to show you how we edit it. I grabbed this waypoint 293. You can see that it has rock pile attached to the waypoint name. Again, this is just our way of programming it to make sure that your icon stays consistent. No matter what system you put it through here, you're going to get your icons back and your waypoints are going to look as they should when you put them back into your unit. So we've got a great waypoint grabbed here. As you can see with the pro subscription, this is where those conditions that I was talking about when we were filtering our waypoints. This is where you can see the conditions of the waypoint. So I actually created this waypoint on August 26, 2020. You can see it was a beautiful day that day, West Wind 83 degrees. I'm really missing that kind of stuff right now. We've got our solar and lunar phases from that day. So it's got a bunch of these conditions attached right to the waypoint as soon as you plug that waypoint into our system. So it's pretty cool once you get to that filtering stuff because you can really narrow down on the type of bite you're looking for. So I got my waypoint. I'm going to click Edit. This allows me to edit the name if I wanted to. If you really wanted to, you could change the name of the lake that it's associated to. Some of our lakes up here change the lakes and you could actually change it to, you know, I guess the title name of that chain to help you pull it up or sort it a little bit better. We've got the option to change how the GPS coordinates are formatted from decimal to DMS. Some of the systems go one way, some of them the other. We also get a lot of questions that come in about how to add the full amount of decimal points to a waypoint. Right now the only way that we can do that is through our website. Unfortunately with the app, there's just only so much real estate that we have to work with there. So right here is where we have the ability to add or subtract any amount of decimal spaces that you want to that waypoint. So again, that's one of the few things that does differ between the website and the app. And I'll show you on the app what it looks like there, but you just, this is where if you want to enter decimal points, just know you got to come to the web. Again we got our, we call them waypoint types, icons. We are in the process of updating these to be more consistent with all of the other platforms and all of the other units out there. But right now we do have some of the basic ones, your mark or your fish structure, hazard, great spot. This is one of the things I'm pretty excited about too. You can upload images to these waypoints. So pretty soon you're going to be able to upload fish catches. If you wanted to keep like a little journal type thing with these, it's kind of cool to go back and say, you know, hey, look at that rock. I've caught X number of fish or these are the fish that I've caught off of that rock and you've got the pictures right there. You can add a note to the waypoint if you want to say this is, you know, rock the size of a blow, sitting down the bottom of a wax down there. We love to look for those big boulders. So this is how you would edit your waypoints. You can go ahead and click save there. We've got all of our edits saved there. It still maintains all of your original information from when you created that waypoint, the date, the conditions will stick with that. You've still got your rock pile label, your icon that's going to go back onto your unit when you export this out of here. So now that you've edited it, you can also share these directly from the website. So you want, you know, old buddy calls up and they, I'm on the wax. I'm struggling, man. Where do I go? All right, I got a spot for you. So you can share this directly with them. Again, you can do this on app. You can do this through the computer. And when you send this waypoint to your friend or whoever, when they open it up , it will automatically take them to the omnia website map page if they do not have an omnia account. So again, if they do not have an omnia account, you send them this waypoint. They are still going to be able to view it on the omnia map page. If they do have an omnia account and they have the app, that waypoint that you sent them will now open up directly in the app. So again, let me just repeat that, if you have an omnia account, the person you are sending the waypoint to has an omnia account, the waypoint will open directly in the app. If they do not have an omnia account, they can still view the waypoint. It just will be on the website. And once you send them that waypoint, that then becomes their waypoint. It's been, you know, it sounds like you can have takebacks on or something. Once you send it to them, it's theirs. They can plug it into their system. They can edit it to how they want. And it's now part of theirs. So we hope that gave you a little bit of a better idea of kind of the capabilities that the omnia waypoint management system really has to offer and how there's some huge advantages in there to having that pro subscription to getting those conditions and being able to filter down to really the conditions that you're looking for. Yep, and stay tuned too because we're continuing to work on this feature adding more more capabilities as we work more closely with the manufacturers. There's a lot of possibilities for taking that enriched data from your way points and getting it back to the device. More more capabilities as far as managing. You know, the filters now are great, but we've got some really cool ideas on being able to draw on the map parts of different lakes that are combined together so you can get multiple lakes or very specific parts of lakes. So we're just going to keep building this out more and more. But we're excited to see you guys use the tool, get some waypoints in there and I think we've got some ideas on how to make that more exciting for you too. Yeah, we're going to keep coming out with these Know Your Whole episodes. We try and do them monthly. So please keep an eye on the YouTube channel, subscribe, hit that like button. And we'd love to hear from you because Dan over here thinks I'm a little crazy. I've got 7,000 plus waypoints and he thinks that's nuts. I want to hear from you. How many waypoints do you guys think you would upload? And what icons are your top five icons that you use all the time? For example, mine is a rock, a tree, a grass, a blue dot and a caution mark. So I'd love to hear what you guys use. And just to be clear, that's not the 7,000. The system will take as many as you want. So import as many as you want. No, we got all the session there. I mean, he's got way more than I do. It can handle way more than that. Yeah, or he can start with less too, but yeah, more and the better. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in everybody. Happy New Year from all of us at Omni-Efficient and keep an eye out for the future episodes and we're going to keep knocking these out for you. [Music]