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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to The Digital Volcano from GE

Source code from an active volcano 🌋

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. The Digital Volcano from GE launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi everyone! Shortly after publishing my iOS 4 jailbreak last October[1], I got to work on my next hobby project: a from-scratch homebrew GPS receiver, which can solve the user’s location solely from billions of radio antenna samples. I took a commodity SDR (alongside the Python standard library and numpy) and built a signal processing pipeline that can detect and track GPS satellites over many minutes, drop and pick up satellites as they come in and out of view, and precisely determine the user’s position and clock inaccuracy. All told, gypsum can go from a cold start to a fix on the user’s…

    2024 · axleos.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…

    Nov 2025 · radi8.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    A multiplayer geography game using Websockets. Contribute to abrenaut/posio development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I'm working on a GPS track visualizer for quite some time. It shines in hilly and mountaineous terrain (where a 3D view makes more sense), but it also offers quite a lot of Strava-like features (statistics etc.). You can upload your GPX and FIT files manually, or sync directly with Garmin, Coros and Polar. See https://cubetrek.com for the live app and check out some examples there. It's free and opens source. Also, anyone who likes to work with 3D visualizations (especially Babylon.js), let me know if you like to help polish this thing further.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you're just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API & coordinate system. (Note…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 63L
  7. 7

    Campo Santo's beautiful adventure game now on Switch

    2018 · nintendo.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8G3

    I made a web app to generate 3D models of real places on earth from land cover and elevation data. Click anywhere on the map to get a polygon, and then click "generate". It should work at most scales, but if your watershed or region selection is too large, the result can be less exciting because it's so flat. As a warning, the 3D models can sometimes be too much for my phone. It's nicer on desktop. I'm still working better on mobile support. The land cover data I'm using gives a cool effect, but at some point I'd like to add in global imagery and clouds. The backend is a Python thread…

    2025 · topography.jessekv.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I built Signet in Go to see if an autonomous system could handle the wildfire monitoring loop that people currently run by hand - checking satellite feeds, pulling up weather, looking at terrain and fuels, deciding whether a detection is actually a fire worth tracking. All the data already exists: NASA FIRMS thermal detections, GOES-19 imagery, NWS forecasts, LANDFIRE fuel models, USGS elevation, Census population data, OpenStreetMap. The problem is it arrives from different sources on different cadences in different formats. Most of the system is deterministic plumbing - ingestion, spatial…

    Mar 2026 · signet.watch · its alternatives →

  10. 10AI

    This is an interactive map of US navigational aids and lighthouses, which indicates their location, color, characteristic and any remarks the Coast Guard has attached. I was sick at home with the flu this weekend, and went on a bit of a Wikipedia deep dive about active American lighthouses. Searching around a bit, it was very hard to find a single source or interactive map of active beacons, and a description of what the "characteristic" meant. The Coast Guard maintains a list of active lights though, that they publish annually…

    Jan 2026 · lighthouses.app · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    GeoGuessr but with Google Earth

    2024 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Lets you explore mountains in your browser.

    2014 · piste.io · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    If React, Vue, Angular, Bootstrap or Tailwind were countries

    2022 · 4it.bz · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    The simple and open source user story mapping tool. - amborle/featmap

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Free open-source GEO tracker for LLM visibility

    Apr 2026 · oneglanse.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16GC

    Hi folks! I'm excited to show you gis.chat, a geospatial chat platform in both senses: a platform about geospatial topics and a geospatial platform itself, referencing the location of our communities. The setup is fairly simple and reproducible: a plain Zulip instance and a homepage with geospatial search capabilities. It seems almost trivial but it has some very nice features. I guess you should be familiar with Zulips stream/topic model to follow along (https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics). The core idea is that there are city-specific streams (currently…

    2023 · gis.chat · its alternatives →

  17. 17AO

    I've recently been working with real-time geoJSON data at a rate of 50+ queries per second. SaaS solutions can be prohibitively expensive at this rate, thus, I created go-reverse-geo. Data is pulled from geonames.org and is stored in MongoDB (a requirement of my current project). It is very much a work-in-progress (I wrote it this morning). Hope someone finds it useful. https://paranoia.dev/vivi/go-reverse-geo

    2020 · its alternatives →

  18. 18OA

    Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere. Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html

    Feb 2026 · octosphere.social · its alternatives →

  19. 19M

    A web platform I've written to make it easy for people to share goespatial time series data and display it on animated heatmaps. There's also a social media component that allows you to write comments, follow, share and like data sets that you want to engage with. You can also download the CSV data and embed animations into your own websites. People uploading datasets can also choose to make money by accepting donations. Please check out the home page for more details: https://mapipedia.com Here are some samples of things created with the platform (press the play button to start…

    2019 · its alternatives →

  20. 20IB

    My friend and I made a fully featured gaming geoguessr - complete with 360 degree panoramas, movement, leaderboards, and multiplayer. We had made a Fortnite geoguessr a while back, and although this was well received, our goal always was to bring the worlds of all games to the browser. A much harder task considering the scale and scope of many open world games. We had to make a bunch of tools to be able to achieve this. World of Warcraft alone took us roughly 3,000,000 images to do (and will likely need another 1,000,000 for Dragonflight once it releases). We are finally at a point where we…

    2022 · lostgamer.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN, I built and just released another Geoguessr alternative. The difference from most other games (and the official one) is that it doesn't use Google Maps APIs at all, which makes the game more sustainable while keeping the service free. This is the successor project to a Geoguessr-like game I built a long time ago. I've been learning since then and felt I could design and implement the project in a cleaner way this time. That motivation led me to rebuild it from scratch. If you’re a light user who’s hesitant about paying for a subscription and looking for an alternative, feel free to…

    Jan 2026 · geoguesslite.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    See Wildfires from Satellites, Track Flights, Quakes, Sharks

    May 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Guess the place in Super Mario Odyssey

    Jun 2026 · odyssey-guessr.lovable.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Discover & Leave Permanent Memories in the Real World

    Jan 2026 · geoechoes.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →