Hydrographic Survey Plugin

[bcn]

Just to draw your attention to an information from Kees regarding crowd sourced bathymetric data :
Yacht Electronics

[Eric.]

Just to let you know I haven't forgot about this project. I have just returned to the boat and need to install the equipment. Hopefully by Feb. we will be able to head out and start collecting some data.

[hellosailor]

Interesting that Kees suggests Navionics will be accumulating datasets. This suggests to me that they will accumulate the raw data (depth, location, time) and then do batch processing to correct that for local tidal heights based perhaps on weather as well as tidal predictions.

Which would solve the problem of how to correct crowdsourced data, and give Navionics an 'exclusive' to sell, in the corrected data sets.

[Eric.]

Professionals are considering ways to use raw "unprofessional" data more and more. I think "Sandy Island" might be an encouraging factor.

On another note, Pavel, I've been trying to build the plugin on Ubuntu 12.04 with not much luck. I've not built OpenCPN and don't have the src and I keep running into dependencies on the cpn code. The latest is with TinyXML. Does OpenCPN have some kind of embedded version or something? I'm having problems getting cmake configured to use libtinyxml-dev. Also the line with wxWidgets (a library I've not used before either): INCLUDE(${wxWidgets_USE_FILE}) is generating an error too.

FYI Here's the cmake errors:

-- *** Building survey_pi ***
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:55 (INCLUDE):
  include called with wrong number of arguments.  Include only takes one
  file.

CMake Warning at CMakeLists.txt:60 (FIND_PACKAGE):
  Could not find module FindTinyXML.cmake or a configuration file for package
  TinyXML.

  Adjust CMAKE_MODULE_PATH to find FindTinyXML.cmake or set TinyXML_DIR to
  the directory containing a CMake configuration file for TinyXML.  The file
  will have one of the following names:

    TinyXMLConfig.cmake
    tinyxml-config.cmake

-- tinyxml library not found
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:188 (INSTALL):
  install TARGETS given no LIBRARY DESTINATION for shared library target
  "survey_pi".

[nohal]

Eric...
Tou definitely must be building OpenCPN to build the plugin and to do so, you must have wxWidgets and TinyXML development libs... So to start, build OpenCPN following the instructions at Compiling - Linux | Official OpenCPN Homepage and then checkout the plugin into the plugins subdir of the main OpenCPN source tree and do the whole build again and you should have the plugin built. If not, let me know and I will tell you what's wrong.

Pavel

[TimThornton]

A belated comment on this thread. Tides are not trivial - in TeamSurv we use a combination of tidal predictions from tidal stations (and we are just putting in a global idal model for offshore use), plus tide gauges where available - and often we only get the data from them with a few months' lag, plus they may be to a different vertical datum from the chart.
We also apply speed of sound corrections - affected by temperature and salinity values - and do a lot of maths to combine tracks to get the best accuracy.
Unfortunately the central limit theorem doesn't apply - if you analyse all of the errors they are not a zero sum - so again this isn't trivial. This is why we do all the number crunching offline.

If anyone wants to contribute data to TeamSurv, they can use the VDR plugin for OpenCPN, as described here: TeamSurv - Navigation Software Compatability

[BMayer]

up
sorry for my (very) poor english

[BMayer]

A data source : TeamSurv - Home
Datas are "raffined" with tidal integration.
May be a little add-on on OpenCPN can display the depth of dedicated waypoints ? or on a layer ?

[fgd3]

At this point the major obstacle I face is feeding data from my depth sounder to my computer. I have a RayMarine depth sounder (ST60 display). Does anyone know to connect the wiring so my computer can see NMEA 0183 sentences from the depth sounder?

Fabbian

[Littlechay]

Those Raymarine instruments communicate via Seatalk so you'll need a seatalk to NMEA 0183 to USB converter.

Raymarine used to make a seatalk to Serial computer interface but I don't think they do it anymore

I'd probably go with one of the Shipmodul units. I have used the miniplex-2USB and the USBwi for exactly what you want to do along with integrating other NMEA feeds including AIS. Others make similar devices such as Brookhouse (I've never got much sense out of there customer support though and reading through the forums here that's a common complaint).

What other instruments do you have and what's connected to your PC? You might already have an instrument or MFD that's capable of doing the conversion.

Chris

[fgd3]

My instruments are Raymarine autopilot, depth instrument, and speed instrument and a Garmin GPS72. The Garmin feeds NMEA data to the autopilot via a port on the display unit. Is that a bi-directional connection? If I had the computer connected to the network could I upload routes from OpenCPN to the Garmin? I know I would have to switch the Garmin from NMEA to GRMN for the transfer, then back to NMEA to make it available to the rest of the network. There appear to be NMEA ports on the autopilot, so I guess I could capture depth information there. The question is how to I bring that into my computer, which has no serial ports, only USB?

At present I use the computer with its own GPS, a BU-353 that plugs into a USB port. I have use a USB to serial adapter to connect my Garmin GPS72. It's cumbersome to set up but sometimes handy for uploading routes from the computer to the GPS.

Fabbian

[petter5]

Originally Posted by nohal

Howdy...
The idea of a plugin able to record and display sounding data appeared a couple of times in the past, so here's a prototype implementation.

Currently the plugin is very simple - it records all the soundings that come reasonably close to a position fix (thanks to SethDart for the code I as usually cannibalized from the dashboard) and draws them as a more or less configurable overlay.
The logic is currently totally unoptimized, so don't expect miracles. There's also no functionality allowing you to organize the recorded data implemented - get spatialite-gui to play with the data at database level (look for survey.sqlite in the same place where your config file is).

Don't worry that you sit in your armchair and don't have an NMEA stream available - the prototype comes with a little testing dataset at 037 52.4031 N 122 18.8240 W

TODO for a reasonable future:

• Sensor (sounder/GPS) offsets to achieve the best possible accuracy
• Performance tuning and display optimization (not much sense to draw all the recorded soundings while at 1:100000 scale etc.)
• Basic data organization functions
• Integration with TeamSurv
• Whatever you suggest

The plugin uses the excellent spatialite library as it's storage backend. It means you can very easily get the data to pretty much any GIS system and you can work with the data directly using standalone SQL tools (Look at https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/spatialite_gui and https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/spatialite_gis).

The Windows build is available at https://github.com/downloads/nohal/s...01_pi17_pi.dll (Perhaps, if not already available on your system, you will also need https://github.com/downloads/nohal/survey_pi/iconv.dll placed in your OpenCPN program directory) - Remember that you need OpenCPN 2.6.1524 for this thing to run.
Source at https://github.com/nohal/survey_pi

As usually any contributions and ideas are more than welcome. If someone feels like wanting to try to code something for OpenCPN, this is an ideal opportunity - the code is really very simple at this point.

Pavel

I would really like to test this plugin under Linux. Since I'm not a progammer it would be very helpfull if any capable person could assist in conpiling the plugin for unbuntu 12.04 and try to assist in setting up a working environment. Since the plugin is not in the official plugins list, I assume it is early alpha code thaqt need a lot more polishing ?? se my post http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post1717331 I would be happy to do testing with Kongsberg Hydrograpical echosoiunder to make this plugin a usefull tool if soneone is interested to continue coding on this plugin

[nohal]

Peter...
First there has to be a person to finish this plugin... It is not released for a reason.

Pavel

[petter5]

Oh, yeah, I realize that. But I really like the idea of this plugin and it would be a great tool for O. I think the commercial Olex is based on the opensource MbSystem MB-System: Mapping the Seafloor with some additions.

If someone is willing to do some serious programming and testing on this plugin ( Linux) with a goal of getting a "Olex" like plugin released for O, I will donate a military grade waterthight Transas NS4000 panel pc for this (worth US$ 5200) https://www.dropbox.com/s/aq9uk8jxev...84%29.pdf?dl=0

[LifePart2]

If I knew C++ I would have a go, but am only fluent in PHP. Oh well.

Very cool waterproof PC!

Noel