Feature Requests

[Dschubba]

Originally Posted by stevead

If you are interested in testing receiving AIS data and you are connected to the Internet then you can manually add any of those AIS servers to OpenCPN.

Go to Options -> Connections -> Add Connection.

Select Network Connection and for example add a new connection with the following settings:
Protocol: GPSD
Address: sinagot.net
DataPort: 2947

Although be careful what you wish for, more AIS targets than you can throw a stick at !

YES, there are coming up so many targets,
that my system is taking a very deep breath ...
before it is going on.
then i do this : for a while.

But this is what i need, to stress my equipment, to make it better or to see the limits.

Now i look for servers from asia, is there any ?

Jörg

[transmitterdan]

There is little point in “stressing” the system with tens of thousands of AIS targets from the internet. Such a situation will never arise onboard a cruising yacht. OpenCPN is intended for typical cruising. It is not intended as a world wide ship traffic monitor. Flooding the NMEA stream with too much AIS data will not tell much about the quality of your equipment. It may lead you to believe there are problems when in fact there are none.

There are some real world NMEA streams available that can be tested using the VDR plugin or my VDR player script.

[OZwingle]

I have been creating a lot of waypoints, trying to take advantage of the information descriptions and icons and layers, in addition to piloting and navigation.

Is there a way to group way points? Or is there an extant feature request to adding grouping ( or set functions ) to waypoints? And if set functions were added, they could be applied to all user objects, such as routes and tracks, as well. For instance, I have taken to naming routes with a country prefix: Fiji.Nananu-Vuda. But that is a workaround, and not very effective at that.

Groups should by user-defined. For example, useful groups might be by county: Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, etc. By purpose: Piloting, Warnings, Diving, Fishing, Marinas (this might duplicate icons, but icons are not searchable now).

Thanks, Rand

[fgd3]

Do you want to keep thousands of waypoints on your charts? If not, consider using the import and export functions to save waypoints. You can use your file system's directory structure to group waypoints and only import the waypoints that will be useful in your current session. At the end of the session, delete all the waypoints from the chart to avoid clutter.


Fabbian

[OZwingle]

Fabbian,


No, I don't want to keep thousands of waypoints on the charts. That bogs down processing too much. And I am willing to use import and export functions to save and restore waypoints. But even then, managing the hundreds of active waypoints in a region becomes awkward without tags, groups, or sets.



And some waypoints are useful to keep active, or part of a layer, even when regional waypoints are archived via export. Locations of Customs/Immigration clearance ports in countries of the South Pacific is an example. I don't need all the detail in Tonga, for example, but it's nice to see the three clearance points when planning a passage there.



Even selecting waypoints to become part of a layer - those left 'visible' - becomes cumbersome. Similarly, selecting specific waypoints to archive via export, if they are not all contiguous in the list, becomes quite cumbersome. That means the waypoint naming convention needs to accommodate alpha-numerical naming rules - but that often loses an intuitive name that represents the place on the chart. Hence "Fiji.Taveuni.Matei_pass_1". Ugh. And these don't transfer to dedicated chart plotters very well. Fiji, the country and Taveuni, the island, would be better as nested groups or better yet, as tags.


Thanks for asking,

Rand

[fgd3]

I have 20 routes with one or two waypoints per route (at one or both ends of the route). Routes have varying numbers of route points. Using shared waypoints at the ends of routes allows me to import routes that share common end points, in effect creating a longer route (although I have to change the active route when I reach the end of one route and the beginning of another). My routes are designed to avoid duplication. For example, I have just one route from my dock to Tampa Bay. Other routes begin at the Tampa Bay end of that route and end at various destination points. Waypoint and route points are named according to the naming specifications of my Garmin GPS72 so that I can transfer routes from OpenCPN to the GPS72 without worrying about writing over an existing waypoint on the GPS.

If the number of routes becomes unmanageable I can simply group them into different directories. The contents of my Routes folder could be subdivided into Routes/Tampa Bay, Routes/Ft. Myers, Routes/Key West, etc. Routes/Tampa Bay could be further subdivided if necessary into Routes/Tampa Bay/Old Tampa Bay, Routes/Tampa Bay/Hillsborough Bay, Routes/Tampa Bay/Boca Ciega Bay, and so forth. Couldn't you group your waypoints and routes into directories to create nested groups?

I don't know how my approach would scale to the great numbers of routes and waypoints you contemplate. It seems to me you are taking on a tremendous data management problem for which there is no easy solution. Coming up with an organizing scheme will help but it will still take a lot of work to conform to the scheme.

Is there a reason you wouldn't organize routes and waypoints geographically? At the speed my boat sails I wouldn't want to import waypoints more than 200 miles away. As I sail away from one area and into another I would delete the routes behind me and import the ones ahead.


Fabbian

[JB1162]

Because this is the right place to suggest it;

Can data currently stored in the C:\Progradata folder, be stored elsewhere. Preferably in a cloud backed up folder, so it is backed up automagically.

[transmitterdan]

If you use OneDrive you can try creating a symlink from c:\programdata\opencpn to a folder in OneDrive. I haven't tried that but it should work.
Obviously move all files in the OpenCPN folder to the new folder in OneDrive first, then delete the OpenCPN folder before you create the link. Create a backup too just to be safe.

[RhythmDoctor]

Sounds like you should run the progam in portable mode. Look up the instructions on how to set this up. Then you can put all the files anywhere you want, including the cloud or SD card.

Not sure OneDrive is the best cloud service for this, because it doesn’t always synchronize everything. (Maybe they’ve improved it since I tried it.) Google Drive is more reliable for me.

I use portable mode for running OpenCPN on all my computers. For Windows tablets it resides on a microSD card, and I can synchronize my charts and everything else a few times a year. (My charts are a little too big to store in the cloud.) For smaller files that change more frequently, like waypoints, routes, and tracks, I keep them on Google Drive, where they get synchronizd to all my computers whenever I’m on the grid.

[transmitterdan]

I thought google drive was no more. Is that wrong?

[transmitterdan]

Originally Posted by RhythmDoctor

I use portable mode for running OpenCPN on all my computers. For Windows tablets it resides on a microSD card, and I can synchronize my charts and everything else a few times a year. (My charts are a little too big to store in the cloud.) For smaller files that change more frequently, like waypoints, routes, and tracks, I keep them on Google Drive, where they get synchronizd to all my computers whenever I’m on the grid.

The programdata folder does not contain charts unless one should put them there for some reason. And why one would do that I can't fathom.

[rgleason]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

If you use OneDrive you can try creating a symlink from c:\programdata\opencpn to a folder in OneDrive. I haven't tried that but it should work.
Obviously move all files in the OpenCPN folder to the new folder in OneDrive first, then delete the OpenCPN folder before you create the link. Create a backup too just to be safe.

Pretty good idea, but be sure about how it works. Simply enabling OneDrive from a prompt, during a Win10 install on a VM that is intended for compiling, caused some weird things to happen, like adding the local Documents and Desktop to OneDrive! See this post. http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post2761176 It took awhile to untangle! I won't enable onedrive on a VM from now on, it is totally unnecessary..

[RhythmDoctor]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

The programdata folder does not contain charts unless one should put them there for some reason. And why one would do that I can't fathom.

I agree, there's no reason to put charts in the programdata folder. But that's not what I was suggesting.

Portable mode requires putting all the files in one place. (See documentation for info on setting it up.) If you put everything on an SD card or USB thumb drive, you can put it into any Windows computer and run your fully configured program. That's why they call it portable. But ideally your charts should be there too or they won't be portable.

Google Drive has been replaced by Google Backup and Sync, which is more flexible but does the same thing. You can still find your files at http://drive.google.com , hence I call it Google Drive.

[JB1162]

Originally Posted by RhythmDoctor

For smaller files that change more frequently, like waypoints, routes, and tracks, I keep them on Google Drive, where they get synchronizd to all my computers whenever I’m on the grid.

Do you manually back them up onto the Google Drive, or have you configured the settings in OpenCPN to do it by itself?

I'm not thinking about charts because they exist online anytime i need them.
It's the data from plugins, logbook etc... that i'm keen to backup automatically.

I export tracks/routes/markers manually to OneDrive.
Interstingly all markers get exported as a single file.
It'd be great if I could choose which folder they get stored in, rather than they defaulting to the C:\Programdata folder.

[mvmojo]

New to OpenCPN and it looks very good. One feature I can't find is the ability to join two routes together. It's nice to have various routes created for navigating up creeks and rivers and then be able to attach these to the beginning or end of a "main" route. Take the Chesapeake Bay as an example. In my old nav program (Nobeltec) I had a route that went from Norfolk all the way up the Bay to the C&D Canal. I also had routes leading up various rivers and creeks. It was easy to split a route, effectively clipping out a piece of it, and then join the end of that piece to the beginning of another route. The result was one route consisting of any number of route points that I could activate, upload to GPS, use for trip planning, etc. Is this possible in OpenCPN?