First Plugin - Remembrancer

[mattkab]

Hi all.

Just thought I'd do a quick post, to share a mostly-complete, simple lightweight plugin I developed over the past few weeks -- my first.

I am building an integrated chartplotter/autopilot with OpenCPN running on Raspberry Pi being the basis. The project is being documented on m blog OpenCPN | m/v C:\[ESC]

Remembrancer is a very basic reminder plugin. All it does is listen for OCPN messages when a route is activated (which will indicate the autopilot is engaged in my particular use case later), and then display an audio/visual alert every X seconds as defined in the properties. The alert is designed to remind the helmsman to do a safety sweep of the vessel.



It is very similar to the Watchman plugin -- and in fact if you are looking for a plugin to use, I would suggest you use that one as it has many more features and bug fixes. The reason I didn't simply use/update Watchman is two-fold:

1) I couldn't get it to run well on my Raspberry Pi instance - OCPN would crash on boot. I'm not sure if that was user error (most likely), setup error, installation error, if the RPi just doesn't have enough power, or if there is code in the plugin that is incompatible. I didn't research enough to find out, because....

2) I have some other ideas for plugins, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to re-learn C++ and plugin development. I think this project was a massive success on that front.

I only wrote (tested) a Linux/English version.

The code is stored at https://github.com/mmtsweng/remembrancer_pi
Please feel free to critique.

Thanks,
Matt B.

[cagney]

Thanks for developing this little plugin and sharing it with us.
I managed to compile it an get it going with a few changes.

In the files alertdialog.h and propertydialog.h the line:

#include <dialogDefinitions.h>
was changed to
#include "dialogDefinitions.h"

I also had to move the ready made plugin manually from the build directory to the plugin directory, it was not done automatically with "sudo make install" (Linux) as expected. I have not checked the reason for this.

Apart from this the plugin seems to work " as advertised"

Thomas