Weather Routing

[rgleason]

Okay I am going to set Divergent course to 80 degrees, and increase increment to 6 hours, and uncheck find land to see if it runs fasterr.

It is apparent that the message at the beginning "Climatology is the wrong version. No climate data" means that the Wx-Rte willl not use climate data until the right version is used. --Why because this routing did not finish using Climate June wind and current. -Also the routing did not recognize and take advantage of the gulf stream currents.

Here are some screenshots of Linux Opencpn at this point. I understand Sean will be working in Weather-routing, probably after or conncurrently with Climatolgy.

[rgleason]

I guess irs pretty clear I need to recompile the data to get it recognized.

[George64]

Can someone please explain the route-option? I create a route from The Roompot (Netherlands) to Ramsgate. In order to get there, one has to cross the shipping lane. This means that the route has some sharp angles. The route the plugin creates is straight ahead, a very costly option....

In the weather pi I cannot load any route information. Is that correct?

[nohal]

George...
Weather routing deals with weather, it really does not care about shipping lanes and even less about your wallet. It's your responsibility to change your course to cross the TSS at 90 degrees.

Pavel

[rgleason]

George, Sean's weather-routing is a work in progress, to my knowledge, "Routes" is not fully functional yet. Also "Batch" is going to allow multiple routes to be run, say starting at different times. I've tried them, but either don't have the hang of it, or perhaps they work in Linux... Sean wants to get to it but we need to finish Climatology first.

Keep in mind that the other functions in Wx-Rte do work and you should try them out with a newly downloaded grib file. Then set the start point by hitting Sync to Boat. and put in some End lat long, then sync to grib time.. Then hit start and hopefully it will create isochrones and route for you. You may have to adjust some settings such as is in Config -Diverted, Degree steps (I use 2 degrees, it generates), time step, I start bigger to get it working. Once you get it working you'll find it does not take long to have good routes.

[rgleason]

In Linux, if you move your cursor to a location and right click, you can now pick "Start weather route" or "End Weather Route" -don't know if this is working in Windows yet.

Sean this is really good! If I could get to that last About Tab in Climatology in Windows, I'd send you a Donation to help with your worldwide trip, for all your hard work on these many many useful plugins! Seriously! Actually, I can donate using Linux Climatology About Tab right now. I do hope others will help Sean too... he needs it for the next leg.

[Taarnskov]

It has been working for me to right click and choose start and end point for the weather routing. Unfortunately i am in the process of re-installing my boat computer and can't therefor not test the current version.

I am using windows XP

Lars

[rgleason]

I think the next goal for Weather_routing should be enabling the Climatology check box. Does anyone have some suggestions, since Sean is probably sailing?

I am not sure why he did this, but between Climate Data version 4 and 5, I believe he tried to save some file space by reducing Currents.gz files. I believe the message that pops up "Climatology plugin version is not correct. No climatology data." and the greyed check box for Climatology appeared.

I am wondering if we could disable that data checking and enable the checkbox for Climatology, if Weather_routing would then be able to use Climatology, or does Weather_routing need to be changed in order to read the new Current files?

It would be very nice to be able to use Climatology wind and current files for routing again, as it will provide data for longer routes where the grib file 8 day period runs out.

See the screenshot.

[rgleason]

I have enabled the Climatology checkbox, however the message
"Climatology plugin version not correct. No Climatology data" Still appears.

I have checked the Climatology data betweeen versions 3 and 5. It appears that the Wind, Current, Sea*.gz, Airtemp files are all the same size. The cyclone data increase in version 4 and then went back down in V5 to match V3. Precipitation appears to have gotton smaller. There do not appear to be very many changed to the data.

There are some other changes that need to be made, to be able to read Climate data, I do not know if it is a switch of some type or if we need to modify the plugin to actually read the new Climate Data version 5. It is probably just a few changes.

Attached is a trace of Climatology references in a portion of the plugin code. I can understand some of it, but with C I don't always get what is acting on what, as it is a sparser language than pascal.

Any help would be appreciated.

[rgleason]

Regarding getting Wx-Rte to read Climatology plugins. I've discovered by looking in weather_routing_pi.cpp and climatology_pi.cpp that there are Version major and minor initializations. - I had that wrong earlier.

So this leaves some type of code conflict with respect to Data, or a test to determine what type of data is available, as possible suspects preventing Climatology from being used to do weatherr routiingg.

[rgleason]

RE:Weather_Routing and Climatology Warning NO DATA Error
and the message "Climatology plugin version not correct, no climatology data"
so that all the work in Climatology cannot be used in Weather_Routing any longer!

This is due to version checking by Weather_routing that Sean setup just before he
left on his voyage. - Something isn't working correctly here I think. I've tried figuring this out again, and I think the problem is becoming clearer.

Running the Climatology Plugin About TAB shows "Climatology Plugin Version 0.2"

It appears Climatology is
Version_Major 0
Version_Minor 2

and Weather_routing sends the warning and will not run Climatology when
major! =0
minor! =1

Weather_routing thinks Climatology version is still major=0 minor=1
but it is not! The portions of the code is attached. I can't find the error yet. Perhaps someone else can. Thank you.

[George64]

After Sean left, version 0.2 of Climatology has been deployed, I assume. If so, than that claryfies the error, because he did not expect a higher version. How are version checks done in other parts of the plugins?

int major = v[_T("ClimatologyVersionMajor")].AsInt();
int minor = v[_T("ClimatologyVersionMinor")].AsInt();
if( major != 0 || minor != 1) {
wxMessageDialog mdlg(m_pWeather_RoutingDialog,
_("Climatology plugin version not correct, no climatology data\n"),
_("Weather Routing"), wxOK | wxICON_WARNING);
mdlg.ShowModal();
return;
}

======
So the test, for this Warning "Climatology plugin version not correct, no climatology data"

I think != should be changed to =<

One thing I would suggest as a change, are the hard coded values of the minimum required version. Why not put those in a ini-file and read them instead of putting them hardcoded?

Just my 2cents

[rgleason]

George64, If you're pretty sure this is the problem, I'll try changing it. Thanks.
This morning I woke up and was going to try compiling Climatology under 3.3.2 which is its actual Opencpn version, but I did it under 3.3.604, which I found forces users to use Opencpn3.3604 to have the plugin work.

Pavel explained how he does this, and confirmed that he compiles plugins on the lowest compatible version of Opencpn that they run on. He also explained how I can "git" back to those versions in order to compile. So I will do that for Climatology in the next couple of days.

[nohal]

Rick...
What George shows is exactly the place you have to touch, obviously 2 is not equal to 1, thus the warning you get with the current version...

The complete fix should probably look something like this to make it easier to maintain and not forget
In weather_routing_pi.h, say at line 35 add

#define MIN_COMPAT_CLIMATOLOGY_MAJOR 0
#define MIN_COMPAT_CLIMATOLOGY_MINOR 2

and if( major != 0 || minor != 1) { in weather_routing_pi.h:233 to

if( major < MIN_COMPAT_CLIMATOLOGY_MAJOR || minor < MIN_COMPAT_CLIMATOLOGY_MINOR) {

@George...
It is not a good idea to store the needed version in the INI, it can have just 2 results: Being totally useless or having us to hardcode the numbers into the code to modify the INI accordingly.

Pavel

[rgleason]

Yes, now I get it. 2 is not equal to 1, should be a less than. My problem with C is I do not know what is acting on what. Pascal is different. Need to learn.

Thank you both Pavel and George, you've been tremendously helpful.
I am working towards:
1. Using my repository "rick" to make these changes.
2. Getting the repository "rick" configured for Opencpn3.2.2
3. Compiling Climatology and Weather_routing again with proper Opencpn and uploading these dlls to file thing, after verifying everything works.
4. Committing the changes back to opencpn with a "pull" request I believe.

Items #1,#3 no problem. Items #2, #4 have not done yet, reading about and learning. Pavel has helped already the Opencpn git points. Am going to try to use this to learn more. Thanks again!