Charts

[manimaul]

The initial singl click satelite photo chart idea was squashed by Google's terms of service. Yahoo and Microsoft also have sat-photo apis.

I skimmed through yahoo's terms of service, it looks promising:
Yahoo! Community Guidelines

Microsoft's api terms might work for us too:
MICROSOFT® BING™ MAPS FOR ENTERPRISE PLATFORM API TERMS OF USE
If I read this right you can store maps locally for personal use:
You may not ..."copy, store, archive, or create a database of the content, except that geocodes may be stored locally only for use with your Applications"

Will

[sinbad7]

A googled map image turned into a useful Caribbean.kap
The Pasaje de Vieques East of Puerto Rico...

Just to convince myself that ANYTHING raster can be used...

[sinbad7]

Re my #186

This is the sort of optional setup I would like in OpenCPN..

[sinbad7]

Using cut & paste from a preparation template makes the data handling easier and less prone to errors when assimilating data for the header.kap file.

When I am using map tiles without defined geo locs, I first do a REF calibration using Fugawi's Marine ENC,which later enables me to also define the geo locs of the map corners. Fugawi Marine ENC also has an option to display the cursor's geo loc in decimal degrees, thereby saving the trouble using external devices for the conversion.

I realize this is 'old hat' to the professionals here so the tips are aimed at the average weekend sailor.

[sinbad7]

Marco..

I thought I had this conversion licked by now. However,having re-constructed a very large .tif (127) map of the Solent.UK. it seems impossible to convert it to a readable .kap file. I thought just about ANY raster material could be used.

I have stored the 'solentmap.tif' in my dropbox here:

The 'solenttemplate.kap' file looks like this:

VER/2.00
BSB/NA=The Solent,NU=,RA=7013,6727,DU=300
KNP/SC=170000,GD=WGS84,PR=MERCATOR,PP=53.0,PI=0.0,SP=
SK=0.0000000,TA=00,UN=FEET,SD=MEAN LOW WATER SPRINGS
DX=5.0,DY=5.0
CED/SE=2002,RE=1,ED=2009
REF/1,4703,3211,50.6997,-00.9777
REF/2,6049,3298,50.7056,-01.1151
REF/3,4966,1971,50.7863,-01.0888
REF/4,6054,1834,50.7951,-00.9773
REF/5,6812,2074,50.7746,-00.8641
PLY/1,50.4873,-01.6754
PLY/2,50.9243,-01.6667
PLY/3,50.9083,-00.7463
PLY/4,50.4712,-00.7552

The attached is a calibration template form containing all the map details.

I's very much appreciate if you could find the time to check it out for me.

[GPS-Marco]

Sinbad7, the map in your dropbox seems broken

I can't download it.

Ciao, Marco.

[sinbad7]

Marco..

Sorry about that, must have been corrupted during upload. I have uploaded a new chart now if you care to try.

[sinbad7]

Marco..

Seems dropbox has problems with large files.

You can download the solent.7z (zipped .tif file) here:

The zipped file is around 5MB, the unpacked file around 50MB so it IS large.. he he
See what you can do with it. (it is a VERY good and detailed map)

[cagney]

In my post #111 I described how to crop a tif. Unfortunately i misled you a bit with my explanation here is the correct version:

$ convert Downloads/nz945.tif -crop 5650x5221+6769+2851 -compress LZW +repage penhryn.tif

nz945.tif original picture
5650x5221 size of cropping from start-point below
+6769+2821 upper left corner of final cropped picture on original - start-point

As I'm proceeding through the NZ tiff pictures I found a big problem. Take the chart "New Zealand Chart Catalogue NZ945" for example consisting of 10 islands and anchorages plans. The way I have done it so far, just writing a template file for the individual plan and using the original chart pictures created 10 chart-lets of the same size as the original.
So to display all the plans on the original 3.5 mb chart I used 35 mb. I can use that space for better purposes on my EeePc.

Of course I could have used my own instructions above, but then there are many of these NZ charts with plans, so I wrote a script that use my original template files to automatically re-crop the pictures and creates a new template file suitable for the new smaller picture and then continues to produce the finished chart.
For now I have used the convention that there are 4 REF:s and 4 PLY:s that start at the lower left corner and proceeds clockwise.
This works fine for these small charts.

The command

$ ./rekap.rb templatenz945_10 Downloads/nz945.tif

Using the original template I wrote for "Nassau" Island in the Northern Cook Islands, produces a chart called Nassau.kap.

In the attached files remove the ".doc" endings.
The script is written in ruby, that works on all platforms.
You also need libbsb and the ImageMagic "convert" program.
Hopefully this will work on all platforms, but is only tested on Linux.
To actually test you have to download nz945.tiff from LINZ:s web site.
I'll probably develop/expand tis script later on.

Thomas

[GPS-Marco]

Originally Posted by sinbad7

Marco..

Seems dropbox has problems with large files.

You can download the solent.7z (zipped .tif file) here:

The zipped file is around 5MB, the unpacked file around 50MB so it IS large.. he he
See what you can do with it. (it is a VERY good and detailed map)

OK, no problem in making the kap. I used your template (I just put some spaces in front of SK and DX row since they belong to the KNP stucture). Note also there is an empty row at the end of the header.

this is what I get:

VER/2.00
BSB/NA=The Solent,NU=,RA=7013,6727,DU=300
KNP/SC=170000,GD=WGS84,PR=MERCATOR,PP=53.0,PI=0.0,SP=
    SK=0.0000000,TA=00,UN=FEET,SD=MEAN LOW WATER SPRINGS
    DX=5.0,DY=5.0
CED/SE=2002,RE=1,ED=2009
REF/1,4703,3211,50.6997,-00.9777
REF/2,6049,3298,50.7056,-01.1151
REF/3,4966,1971,50.7863,-01.0888
REF/4,6054,1834,50.7951,-00.9773
REF/5,6812,2074,50.7746,-00.8641
PLY/1,50.4873,-01.6754
PLY/2,50.9243,-01.6667
PLY/3,50.9083,-00.7463
PLY/4,50.4712,-00.7552

Unfortunately the calibration is somewhat wrong: the attachment is what I see in OCPN. The chart is mis-aligned with respect to its borders and also if I compare it with the CM93 map. I can't help you more since I don't know where are the calibration points you used. Try to double check them.

Ciao Marco.

[dacust]

For those of you that are interested in the MapCal to BSB conversion that Marco proposed, I started a new thread on that. The beta version is ready for testing.

mc2bsbh MapCal template to BSB template conversion

-dan

[sinbad7]

Marco..

I don't know what it is but I can not get the map to display at all even using YOUR template??

[GPS-Marco]

Originally Posted by sinbad7

Marco..

I don't know what it is but I can not get the map to display at all even using YOUR template??

This is strange:

I copy paste the header from the post #205 (just add an empty line at end)

I run tif2bsb with the header and the tiff I extracted from your .7z

the result loads in OCPN without problem (of course calibration is not exact...)

Ciao, Marco.

[sinbad7]

Marco..

Yes very strange. Are you running Vista? I did EXACTLY as you suggested but no map generated. I have other UK maps in the same directory which DO generate. Please see the attached part hex dump of the header of the solent.kap file.

[sinbad7]

Marco and Dan

I re-calibrated the Solent map using MapCal II, used your new conversion formula to create the solent.hd file and finally tif2bsb and it all worked PERFECTLY!!
Thanks a lot for your help and patience.. What a relief not to have to do the boring conversions from deg/min to decimal degr. Keep developing he automated process.