Fighting with Dr. Depth.
No No, i am sorry, no Talk about the Autopilot in this episode, this will be done in the next one.
Yesterday i bought one copy of the DrDepth Software.
The first hour playing with it was frustrating.
Putting the NMEA Raw Data from the Sonar into it was a struggle.
If yo push the convert button, it says "conversion OK", but nothing happens.
After some time i found out, that this function does what it means: It converts the data. But nothing more. You then have to re-open the converted file, then it worked. The next problem were the depth artifacts from the launch-point. They created a real abyss on the launch point (about 6600m in depth)
Which in turn made the rest of the plot very flat ;-)
After having sorted out all buttons and switches, the Batteries of my MacBook went down. (the AC Adapter i have left in the company). Close to the finish and i missed it!
Nearly sleepless night.
In the morning i first did a little bit of NMEA Archeology, to find all the various files i have sampled in the past six months. A pretty lot of files!
Then i manually took out all the artifacts (the times, when i knew all the switches of GREP by heart are long ago and so i did it with a text editor). Where is that copy of this old UNIX manual from ´84 ? Maybe Ken is reading it on my bookshelf, should have a closer look in the cellar.
Then all data converted (and re-opened :-) ) in DrDepth and :
- thats it -
... in 2D ...
...in 3D...
... And the contour lines
Real amazing! It also creates the.kml reference files for the 2D and the contour files with alpha-blending.
It is crazy, what it produces with such a low amount of data! I took only a few criscrossing trips and a better result than all that MatLab crunching.
OK, there are some weaknesses in the Program, but actually im am still in the enthusiastic phase.
Thats all for today, next time something about the ArduPilot Hardware (i swear)...
Comments
Really awesome project. I can think of so many uses...
-Mark