Minnesota Speed Traps Part 2 - Have you gotten a speeding ticket lately?

Last week I did a post on Rosemount Minnesota Speed Traps. I received comments about speeds traps through my Facebook page. The friend that commented on that said there is a site called Trapster. I looked into Trapster and it is a FREE service that allows users to share the location of police speed traps using mobile phones and other types of devices.  

I love free.

They brag over 3.8 million logged speed traps and around 4000 new traps posted daily. I looked through the Trapster website and it is mainly designed for these phones:

• iPhone
• BlackBerry
• Android (the TMobile G1 and others)
• Nokia N95, N96, N97, 5800, E71, and other Symbian s60 phones
• Palm WebOS phones such as Pre and Pixi
• Windows Mobile touch screen phones with 6.0, 6.1, or 6.5 OS and GPS
• Unlocked J2ME phones with GPS (for example the Sprint Samsung Instinct) 

I'm a techie type of guy--at the same time--I'm also frugal.  I don't have the most updated phone to use Trapster. I do, though, have the latest TomTom XL GPS. I found that I could download Trapster data and it can be inserted into a Garmin, TomTom, or other GPS Navigation Device.

What Trapster does for us GPS users is creates four POI (Points of Interest) for your GPS. These are:  

1. trapster-combo-camera-ahead
2. trapster-police-enforcement-point-ahead
3. trapster-red-light-camera-ahead
4. trapster-speed-camera-ahead

Once the .zip files are downloaded to a computer, one would just need to load all the files into the GPS.

Basically one needs to connect the GPS to the computer and go into the downloaded Trapster .zip file and copy and paste the files into the correct folder in the GPS using the instructions that Trapster provides on their website. Once the files are in the GPS then someone must activate the POIs and configure alerts on the TomTom. That's about four steps for each of the four POIs. These settings are important to do since they tell the GPS to speak out or warn you when you approach a Trapster POI.

One must remember to periodically go into the Trapster website (I'd say about once a week) and get the updates. This part is a bit of a pain. Perhaps they should have some software that would insert those updates into the correct folder automatically when the GPS is connected to the computer.

I've used it for a week in my GPS. Though I have yet to see a cop sitting at a Trapster speed trap, in the areas that I am familiar with normally having speed traps, the Trapster POI has been accurate.

Here is the link to Trapster:  http://www.trapster.com/