A Row Around Iceland

Date: 2025-06-30 00:00

Last night (20250630), I finished rowing the Ring Road around Iceland using the Maprower project. It translates movement into keystrokes for Google Street View. It took four years of sporadic rowing. I documented my trip in varying detail.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/1VCFJxynzbbYUq4Q6

(Or if you don’t want to visit Google, you can see a picture here.)

Iceland Route

I am using a system that I created called “Maprower”. It is a device that clips onto a Concept 2 ergometer handle that contains an Adafruit ESP32-S3, an Adafruit BN0085, and a small battery for powering the system. As of Aug ‘25 I’m still in the process of posting the files to codeberg but I think all of the code is up. I still want to post the 3d printer files, although at the moment they are a bit kludgy. Anyways, the repo is here:

https://codeberg.org/raxfach/maprower

For my trip, I started at the Reykjavik Natura hotel parking lot and went up into the fjordlands, then across, down, and west again to finally arrive at the Reykjavik domestic airport terminal. I left pins at the end of each row, usually, so many are tagged “EOR”. Unfortunately, I didn’t start recording time and distance rowed until part of the way through so I don’t know how long it took or how far I rowed. Most of the beginning sessions were 12 kilometers and roughly 1 hour.

You can get almost all of the way around iceland by Google Street View. There are some large sections with no coverage on the east side and of course there’s no coverage in many tunnels, some of which are quite long. Much of the road system is connected but you will need to jump ahead from time to time or use the mouse to reposition yourself, particularly in urban areas where there are lots of big intersections.

Regarding the controller, I did not have a bluetooth HID device at the beginning, I was using an optical system and a wired handle controller, believe it or not. It worked ok, but, as to be expected, the wire wore out. I replaced it with a Pololu Wixel based system which worked great. Then the ESP32-S3s came along and really simplified everything.