OpenCPN

[Kermit]

May I suggest an anchorage alarm for the next release?

[Rhoel_Asia]

One question I have regards displaying "home grown" charts which are not in S-57. I currently live in a region where there are few charts and none that I can see which are geared up for small craft. Pilotage charts are therefore often the only viable navigation tool.

I have collected some general pilotage charts which are in either non-GeoSpatial AI data formats and others from an (coughs) unofficial acquired government produced GIS data in ArcGIS shapefile format. The home-grown material was sourced from satellite imagery which was aligned by local GPS trig points - not S-57 navigation grade but significantly better than low-res charts.

Is there any way either now or in the future for including/displaying shapefile (or another home-grown format) pilotage charts in OpenCPN?

Rhoel

[bdbcat]

Folks....

Release management bugs on this end, along with flakey WiFi connection....

Anyway, V1.3.3 Build 716 is now available at
opencpnbeta

Thanks for your patience.

Dave

[Islander]

A feature request for us sailors, how about a flechette showing apparent wind strength and direction? Could implement like in SeaClear but use the standard flechette barbs to denote wind strength?

Great product, I'll test 1.3.2 extensively under Vista over the next month on my trip.

Cheers

[Tia Bu]

I sent the message below to the developer via email yesterday. He emailed right back!! and said he'd seen the issue before but couldn't remember the solution. He suggested posting here to see if anyone has any ideas.

Hi Dave:

I downloaded Opencpn a couple of days ago onto a machine running Ubuntu Linux. It runs great, and I'm much impressed. NOAA raster and ENC charts just run phenomenally and all your most recent improvements (mousewheel zoom, etc.) run great.

I then found two CM 93 cd's on the Internet and downloaded them through a torrent download. I unpacked them using Ark software. The files all appear to be there. But when I try to load them into Opencpn using the wrench icon, I get only a brief flashing of one brown bar on the lower horizontal bar. Then the brown bar disappears, and none of the CM 93 charts seem to be there.

I'm thinking this may still be an unpacking/unzipping problem. The CM 93 files appear to have been zipped in 2004 using Winzip 95. Does anything strike you immediately as a possible solution?

What a cool program and a wonderful thing! I hope this is an appropriate and useful bit of feedback and inquiry. Thanks for all you've done!

[ChuckSK]

Wheel zoom works great.

Chuck

[Tia Bu]

For what it's worth, I just installed Opencpn on a Windows XP machine and had the same problem with the CM 93 chart files as I had on the Ubuntu machine. So this doesn't seem to be a Linux problem. Does this problem sound familiar to anyone?

[sinbad7]

Thanks Dave, you're on the ball as usual...
OpenCPN working fine now AND, all the stray targets in zoomed-out mode has all gone.

One oddity though,perhaps it's MY system, but the new version was NOT allowed to overwrite the old one. I had to re-name the old file and then install.Finally delete the old renamed file. This was the same on my Vista laptop as well as the XP desktop. This never happened when upgrading previous versions.??

The question of all the incomplete message (yellow) targets still remain but no doubt will be resolved in time.

Thanks again for a great job..

[sinbad7]

Tia Bu ... Your cm93 loading problems. I never had any problems loading the cm93 charts. Do you think you have perhaps downloaded corrupt files? Try from a different source. Sometimes pirated software are missing headers and can be infested with virus to boot.

[cagney]

Tia Bu
You may have downloaded a CM93_3 version. OpenCPN works with CM93_2.
You can recognize CM93_2 by looking at the directory/ file structure.
First you should have a whole lot of directories named 00901020 and similar. Each of these in turn contains directories called A , B ... etc and a 00901020.inf file.

Thomas

[Viking Sailor]

Dave, sinbad7,

I had the same download problem that sinbad7 had. So thanks sinbad7 for your help getting back on track. Beta 716 now works great on my XP box.

Thanks again,

Paul

[Tia Bu]

Cagney:

It looks like I've got the CM 93-2 file structure you describe. My first download was CM 93-3 as you described, but I quickly discovered that mistake and downloaded the older version. But my problem is with the CM 93-2 files.

On Ubuntu, the files in the A and C subfolders appear to still be archived in some sort of format, even after "unraring" and "unzipping", but no software I've tried recognizes the format. In Windows XP, those same files appear as normal, unzipped chart files (I think) but Open CPN won't load the charts.

I've tried dearchiving/unzipping with a number of softwares in both Ubuntu and XP. Nothing is working so far.

[cagney]

Tia Bu
Ubuntu is identifying the files in the sub folders based on ending of the file. *.A in the A folder etc. This is then erroneously seen as an ar , archive file.( try " man ar"). This is a bug, the files all seem to be binary blobs. Similar in the other subfolders.
As sinbad7, I can only sugest a corrupt download (or corrupt file on the torrent server). I have had a few of those myself , playing all kind of pranks on you.

Thomas

[idpnd]

Originally Posted by Islander

A feature request for us sailors, how about a flechette showing apparent wind strength and direction? Could implement like in SeaClear but use the standard flechette barbs to denote wind strength?

This is available in Navmonpc if you're on windows. I didnt know seaclear supports NMEA inputs? Apparently so.. "Optionally other NMEA instruments may be connected. Depth, Compass and Wind is displayed if present."

Originally Posted by Rhoel_Asia

Is there any way either now or in the future for including/displaying shapefile (or another home-grown format) pilotage charts in OpenCPN?

GRIB file support for weather data is on the wish-list. The NOAA pilot charts are published free of charge in PDF format; if they could be sourced in an image format / KAP / converted to KAP this could possibly be implemented? These sailing/passage planning tools are possibly out of the spec (en-route software) although it woudl be fantastic for sailors.

Originally Posted by Tia Bu

For what it's worth, I just installed Opencpn on a Windows XP machine and had the same problem with the CM 93 chart files as I had on the Ubuntu machine. So this doesn't seem to be a Linux problem. Does this problem sound familiar to anyone?

Corrupted files probably, try again.

[phiggins]

Dave,

Thanks for the quick response in improving the AIS CPA graphic in the new beta version. Looks great on Vista. Is there a linux version of this beta so I can try on the XO?