My first contact with a digital magnetometer dates back to the summer of 2009. At that time, as many arduinoers, I was more concerned about coding the I2C/SPI driver other than understanding the device itself. A few months later I got an iPhone 4 and realized that the compass application, which used the internal phone magnetometer, required calibration every time it had to be used. And so, I became interested on why was this step required and how can it be done. In this post I will try to explain, together with a practical example, a way to do it. It is in essence the method described here, but with some more details and references.

After trying some of the TopoJSON examples I could not resist the temptation of learning more about it. As a Catalan citizen, I decided to focus on Catalonia (or Catalunya in Catalan). Before starting I did a quick search to see if somebody else had already used TopoJSON in my region. I found some nice examples from a couple of authors: martgnz and rveciana. However in these examples little information is given on how maps are generated. Particularly topics like map simplification or projection are not discussed. So I decided to write this post where I explain in some detail the process of generating the TopoJSON maps for Catalonia.