Hi *,
So I got Google Earth working on my netbook at last -- it's still
slow, but somewhat usable. Anyway, having screwed up entering
altosui's GPS coords into my phone, and thus having to spend a good
minutes looking for my rocket instead of seconds, it occurred to me
that having a marker on google maps/earth would have clued me in
better. And then I thought it'd be even cooler if I could watch Google
Earth plotting my rocket's trajectory from telemetry data while it was
in flight.
It looks like that's possible. Attached are a quick and dirty python
script and netlink kml file. If you run the python script against a
kml file exported from altosui, then point google earth at the netlink
file you'll get to watch a replay of your rocket flight. Pretty cool,
I think!
All the script does it keeps a counter of (virtual) seconds since
launch, and copies all the coordinates from the kml file up to that
time into altos-live-data.kml (it also adds a pin at ground level
corresponding with the latest coordinate telling you what time stamp
it's up to). The altos-link.kml file just tells Google Earth to look
at altos-live-data.kml and refresh it every second. Command line
invocation looks something like:
$ googleearth `pwd`/altos-link.kml &
$ python ./livekml.py 2010-10-17-serial-224-flight-010.kml
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj(a)erisian.com.au>
