Hi! we’ve made progress in the past week in the field of visualizing Aerocene flights tracking info.īill Clark, from, has granted the Aerocene Foundation a license to his online coordinates batch conversion tool. This are some of the images I generated, in this case something interesting is the vertical line that goes from the balloon to the floor, that’s a sensor falling! The diagonal lines seem to be data inconsistencies. One other mistery I cannot understand, is that in order for the Salinas flight visualization to be accurate, I had to position first the longitude, and then latitude, otherwise it would display the wrong position. Regarding the sensor itself, and apart from the complex NMEA coordinates output, it separates the information into several files, which adds another step in order to join the GPS coordinates of a day of flight.
In order to edit the KML file, replace with your own coordinates information where relevant, close and save. From this file, just select all and copy.
Once this is done, we open the CSV file with a simple text or code editor, like Notepad, Text Edit or Sublime Text. Now, once we have this values, we need to generate a CSV file (Save as Comma Separated Values) with just latitude and longitude information. In my case, I am using Excel in spanish, I figured out the following formula: It looks easy but accomplishing this for a batch of hundreds of GPS fixes is not that easy. This is horrible for processing, since we have to achieve the following operations to convert to KML file’s more standard degrees and degree decimals.
As per the NMEA standard fact sheet, coordinates are expressed in ddmm.mmmm, which is full degrees and minutes with decimals. This format is actually the NMEA standard, which serves the purpose of communicating different marine electronics, for instance GPS and Radar information into a plotter. The coordinates are stored in a weird format, here’s an example > -2336.5095, -6553.6714. In addition, each item usually has attributes that describe it, such as name or temperature.As Tomas suggested, I am opening this thread to work on visualizing trajectory data from the Aerocene’s tracker. The shapefile format can spatially describe vector features: points, lines, and polygons, representing, for example, water wells, rivers, and lakes.
Esri developed and regulated it as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products. The shapefile format (SHP) is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. For example, each place always has a longitude and a latitude. The KML file specifies a set of features (placemarks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) displayed on maps in geospatial software implementing the KML encoding.