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GoneCodFishing

flysight - Altitude vs distance graph

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Is there any way to get the above?

Flysight viewer 'claims' to do it, but i don't know if the current version is a duff or something. I downloaded it and installed it a few times and not only it doesn't offer the above option, i get innumerable bugs and program crashes.

I tried a trial version of Paralog to see if purchase was worth it, and doesn't offer that either.

Any suggestions?

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GoneCodFishing

In paralog the X axis is fixed as Time (i think, i couldn't find a way of changing it), with the other parameters taking Y.

What i was after is having distance in the X axis and altitude in the Y axis, ideally both in the same scale, so basically a cross sectional view of the flight.



Could it be a Glide Ratio that the OP is after?

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

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Hey, yes i came across your old post in that flysight thread some time ago, and played around till i got an excel template that worked on my pc after some fighting to get it scaled right.

Unfortunately i somehow lost (by that read i deleted...) that file, hoping there was software that would do it out there :(

Time to get back on it i think

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shropshire

Could it be a Glide Ratio that the OP is after?



Nope. Just a 2D visualisation of the flight.

Let's see if i can explain myself;) If straight out the door till pull time i fly a theoretically perfect GR of 1:1, the graph would be a 45 degree line. Whereas falling straight down (ignoring the hill for clarity's sake) it'd be a vertical line. A frefaller's graph would be something like a slope from exit going into a vertical line...

Now that i think of it, it'd be something like this http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Exit/Wind_Drift_Exit_Order_Graphic_25.html what i'm trying to get from the flysight data.

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GoneCodFishing

***Could it be a Glide Ratio that the OP is after?



Nope. Just a 2D visualisation of the flight.

Let's see if i can explain myself;) If straight out the door till pull time i fly a theoretically perfect GR of 1:1, the graph would be a 45 degree line. Whereas falling straight down (ignoring the hill for clarity's sake) it'd be a vertical line. A frefaller's graph would be something like a slope from exit going into a vertical line...

Now that i think of it, it'd be something like this http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Exit/Wind_Drift_Exit_Order_Graphic_25.html what i'm trying to get from the flysight data.


I added the Altitude/Distance graph.
This version is a betaversion as it contains some parts that is currently in development.
The graphpart should be stable but the "betapart" might be unstable.
The betapart is the landingaccuracy and swoopdistance part.

If you have a older version of my macro installed you need to uninstall it.
(run it and choose uninstall in Excelsettings).

Then install this version (doubbleclick) on the file.

Your settings will be lost while you uninstall the old version but you can move the file from the C:\Flysight folder to save the settings if you want.

This is NOT A ZIP FILE! Do not "unzip it".
It should be saved as a xlam-file, not zip.

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GoneCodFishing

Wow, thanks for that. I'll see if i can get it working :)





No problem.

But when I think about it, you want a winddrift chart?
Meaning if you drift back beyond the point where you exited the aircraft you want negative numbers on the chart?
Because the above file does not do that.

I think I know how to do it, if you need it.

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Hellis

But when I think about it, you want a winddrift chart?



No, not at all. That link was an example of what i meant by "2D representation of flight."

All positive numbers is what i'm after, that is after all what 'flattens' the 2D horizontal plane into unidirectional (i may have made that word up) 1D to give a total distance of flight regardless of any turns. i.e. going 100ft one way and 200ft the opposite way gives 300ft horizontal flight rather than -100ft.

Thanks again :)

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GoneCodFishing

***But when I think about it, you want a winddrift chart?



No, not at all. That link was an example of what i meant by "2D representation of flight."

All positive numbers is what i'm after, that is after all what 'flattens' the 2D horizontal plane into unidirectional (i may have made that word up) 1D to give a total distance of flight regardless of any turns. i.e. going 100ft one way and 200ft the opposite way gives 300ft horizontal flight rather than -100ft.

Thanks again :)
If there is no wind ;)
A GPS detects movement across the ground without windeffect.

Anyways, good that it solved your problem.
I will fix the "issue", if you choose Airtime as X-axis this chart will still have hDistance as X-value reference.
I didn't think of that "issue" until after I uploaded the file here.

There will be an update to fix that later, probably when I'm finnished with the landingaccuracy/swoopdistance thing.
Needs some more work before it becomes real useful.

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GoneCodFishing

***If there is no wind ;)
A GPS detects movement across the ground without windeffect.



Which is why if i'm harvesting that sort of data i fly 2 crosswind stages with a 180 turn in the middle. B| Not perfect but close enough.

Air density is not the same than....

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phoenixlpr

Air density is not the same than....



Do you mean air density changes due to altitude/temperature/humidity or air density somehow affected by wind?

I never heard of the later...

Regardless, air density affects L and D equally, so even though the vertical and horizontal speeds will be affected, the resulting L/D (GR) should be unaffected, theoretically... Not that experienced myself to confirm or debunk though

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GoneCodFishing

***Air density is not the same than....



Do you mean air density changes due to altitude/temperature/humidity or air density somehow affected by wind?

I never heard of the later...

Regardless, air density affects L and D equally, so even though the vertical and horizontal speeds will be affected, the resulting L/D (GR) should be unaffected, theoretically... Not that experienced myself to confirm or debunk though

I think it will be easier and more accurate to use the data from weatherstations (if that exist).
Normally you have a windspeed change of 10-20 knots (sometimes more) between FL100 and FL050, and a directionchange of 10 or so degrees.
The direction doesn't make much difference but the stenght does.

So if you "collect" upwind data first you normally have higher winds thus resulting in slower groundspeed.
When you change direction and go downwind you normally have less wind.
I believe your data will be inaccurate, but it could be worth a try.

Good luck!

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I'm a bit late to the party, but wanted to let you know that this is something the "in-development" FlySight viewer can do. The main design goal with the new viewer is to keep the interface as simple as possible, but give quick access to the most important things we look for in a jump. Here's what it looks like now:

http://imgur.com/FzwrL2L

The top view is the usual something-versus-time/distance plot. The bottom three are the "front", "top", and "side" views of the part of the jump shown above. You can also see there's a small dot which shows up under the mouse, and is reflected in all three views so that you can easily connect, e.g., an increase in vertical speed with a turn.

It's a bit rough around the edges, and development has been slow lately because I've been busy with other work. However, if you're interested in giving it a whirl (Windows/Mac) shoot me an email at "support at flysight dot ca". Let me know which operating system you use, and I'll send the latest version.

The source code (C++/Qt) is a total mess right now, but as soon as I get a chance to tidy things up a bit, I'll be making that available too.

Michael

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A while back I wrote some C++ libraries for coordinates and coordinate interpolation. And also some C++ libraries that write KML files. At that point it was pretty easy to write a data factory that reads GPS data in lat/long/alt and output a KML file you can view in google earth. I have a flysight data factory that can read your flysight CSV file into a vector of coordinates, which is all the data factory needs to output the KML. It works pretty well with flysight files (No so much with data from my cell phone heh heh heh.)

There are some down sides, not least of which is that I've only tested it on Linux and only with a very recent C++ compiler. The auto-canopy-deployment detection generally works reasonably well as long as you don't feed it a CSV that has multiple jumps or a long plane ride. You can just ignore that placemark if you don't like it.

All my source code is available on Github with a free license (Modifications and any use of the code is allowed as long as I'm attributed as the original author.) You need to pull several of the libraries to build it: Coordinates, time, the data factories, my cheesy XML library, and the main program.

If that doesn't do what you want directly, you could read the coordinates with the data factory, convert them to ECEF, which provides coordinates in meters and traverse the ECEF vector to calculate the delta between the current coordinate and the last one. Then you could output the current altitude and distance traveled since your last point into a file suitable for plotting with gnuplot.

One of these days if I'm bored and want to learn Amazon cloud services, I might try to write a web-based front end that lets you upload a flysight CSV file and download the KML file. That'd be a fun little weekend project. Hmm...
I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

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Hellis

Why require internet conection to create a KML?
Don't see the logic of that.
What would the end user gain from having it web based?


I know Paralog has a similar feature but it's also web based.



They wouldn't have to run Linux or compile it themselves.
I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

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Hellis

I see.

Back in the days when I used C++ you could compile a exe-file.
Is that not possible anymore?



Oh, you can still do that. Problem is I'm using parts of the C++11 standard from GCC 4.7.2, which may or may not have been implemented windows yet. Other than that I use a couple of boost libraries and the Eigen math library, which are fairly portable. It would probably be fairly trivial to port it to Microsoft's C++ -- I'm not forking processes or threads and not using sockets, so the code should be pretty portable. The std::enable_if stuff might not work correctly with Microsoft's compiler, but it might if you replace it with boost::enable_if (Or just compile all the functions into the class -- it wouldn't make THAT much overhead.)

So if you want a Linux executable, it's easy, just install GCC 4.7.2 for your distribution, grab the eigen math library, grab the boost libraries (You were going to anyway if you're using C++ at all) and compile the executable.

If you want to do it under windows with visual C++ you might need to change some code around for it to work, but there's nothing terribly esoteric or nonportable in it, so it should be pretty easy. Boost is very portable and Eigen should be too.

You might also be able to find find a cygwin gcc 4.7.2 if you're running cygwin under windows. That would also make it fairly easy to compile.

It _should_ also compile with clang but I'm not 100% positive of the OS availability of that one outside of Linux.

I'm working on the assumption that most people don't want to install Linux on their computer or fiddle with getting the code working on Windows. All it takes is one person to fiddle with getting the code working on Windows and it gets a lot easier.

Funnily enough this should be very easy to get working on an Apple machine, since OSX is basically just UNIX and all the necessary tools should already be available (And may in fact already be installed on the system.)
I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

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You kind of touched the subject that is one of the reasons why I don't like open source.
Everyone keeps talking about open source as it's the new "sliced bread", but in my opinion it sucks!

As you said, people don't want to fiddle around to get stuff working.
Most people don't even know where to start.
And then there is the obvious risk of the code beeing used as a "virus".

Someone uses your code as the carrier of a virus or spysoftware or whatever.
They do some changes to the open source code and install their stuff, then compile it and calls it "super kml flysight file" or something.

With open source you only get the very few people that can read the code.


Anyways, rant mode off ;)

Good luck with it.
Don't forget that some people want the numbers as much as the kml.

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Hellis

You kind of touched the subject that is one of the reasons why I don't like open source.
Everyone keeps talking about open source as it's the new "sliced bread", but in my opinion it sucks!

As you said, people don't want to fiddle around to get stuff working.
Most people don't even know where to start.
And then there is the obvious risk of the code beeing used as a "virus".

Someone uses your code as the carrier of a virus or spysoftware or whatever.
They do some changes to the open source code and install their stuff, then compile it and calls it "super kml flysight file" or something.

With open source you only get the very few people that can read the code.



You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
www.WingsuitPhotos.com

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