OpenCPN SIMRAD/LOWRANCE Radar Overlay PlugIn

[rgleason]

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post2054553

[ve7mdl]

Hi Douwe,

Thanks for the pointer. The Windows version works very well with my Simrad G4 - at least at the dock. With all the boats and boat sheds around it is hard to get a good picture, but at least the radar appear to be working and the controls respond.

A couple of comments:

1. I miss range rings. Is is possible to enable some?

2. In the non-overlay mode, the radar shows head-up as it should, but the boat symbol remains in the direction it was pointing when the chart display was on. That could confuse some people.

But I must say this plugin is really getting very nice. I look forward to seeing the Linux version someday.

Cheers, ....Erik.
Home

[Douwe Fokkema]

Originally Posted by ve7mdl

1. I miss range rings. Is is possible to enable some?

2. In the non-overlay mode, the radar shows head-up as it should, but the boat symbol remains in the direction it was pointing when the chart display was on. That could confuse some people.

But I must say this plugin is really getting very nice. I look forward to seeing the Linux version someday.
Home

Hi Erik,

Range rings: Just getting rings on the screen is not the problem, but doing the menus for it and the texts on the screen makes it quite some work. Better wait for Merrimac his "cutting edge" radarwindow, range rings should be there. In the mean time, ocpn_draw_pi-0.4.669-ov4.2-win32 should be able to do range rings (and EBL), see https://tgp-architects.com/files/

Boat symbol: Yes, confusing, but is is put there by OCPN after we draw the radar image. It can be made very small in the OCPN own ship settings, but then you might miss it in normal operation.

Linux: Version 1.3 works fine under Linux. I have not tested 1.302 on Linux, but it should work. Build and try I would say.

Douwe

[NAV]

Attached is latest version of Dutch language file, based on pot in Github (5 months old, and missing strings for 'BR24 requirements window').

[Douwe Fokkema]

I just checked the OCPN plugin page: PlugIns for OpenCPN 4.2 | Official OpenCPN Homepage

The br24radar_pi plugin is listed there now, it is version 1.301, (with the error from 1.3 corrected), perfectly OK to use!
Thanks to Pavel or whoever put it there. The link to the sources is still wrong, pointing to canboat/master.

Douwe

[NAV]

Dutch language file that fits the version on the plugin page of opencpn.org is attached.

One small issue: the string 'Antenna height (m)' is not shown in Dutch.

[Hakan]

NAV...
re: "One small issue: the string 'Antenna height (m)' is not shown in Dutch."

It's present in Crowdin but last .po files from there are not in any source yet.
(And nl.po has one untranslated string in Crowdin as of today. )
Håkan

[NAV]

Originally Posted by Hakan

NAV...
re: "One small issue: the string 'Antenna height (m)' is not shown in Dutch."

It's present in Crowdin but last .po files from there are not in any source yet.
(And nl.po has one untranslated string in Crowdin as of today. )
Håkan

Håkan,

The string 'Antenna height (m)' is present in the po (and thus mo) file I'm using.

The string 'GPS' is shown in the po-file but the translation disappears again and again for unknown reasons. In CrowdIn all strings are translated (I just checked again), and CrowdIn does not contain the 'GPS' string .....

A misfit between dll version and po version perhaps? See attached po-file.

[Hakan]

NAV..
Ok - I see a mishmash with this as well.
We'll check but a bit busy this week - sorry.
Thanks
Håkan

[arnolddemaa]

Hi, first of all I would like to thank you guys for making such a wonderful product. I use the radar plugin for over a year. And it has grown into a very mature product. I understood that you are currently developing for a new version with distance rings etc.

Now, there is always something to be desired of course. What I at the moment is wrong "MARPA target tracking" you would say that this is not needed in the AIS era. Wrong. You amazed you how many ships there around boating without AIS. Estimating speed, distance and price is actually in the dark not to. During the Atlantic crossing to Suriname have I missed this function multiple times. Most fishing vessels off the coast of South America have no AIS turned on.

Arnold the Maa

[Hakan]

Hi
My contribution to distance rings and EBL discussion above:
In my view we already have enough tools for both.
OCPN has range rings as an option and the plugin "OCPN_draw_pi" serves nice EBLs.
Range rings are activated by Tools > Ships > Own ship > Show range rings
Draw plugin version 1.0 is newly released on PlugIns for OpenCPN 4.2 | Official OpenCPN Homepage
(The EBL can be set up to follow either COG or heading)

The pictures below shows my use of range rings and EBL (two), both in chart overlay and stand alone (when compass is missing?) use.
(Yes, I know the stand alone picture is somewhat confusing since I didn't switched heading off before screen shoot. )

BTW: I new version of BR24.. including all Crowdin translations is ongoing.

Håkan

[ve7mdl]

Hi Håkan,

Good point, I didn't think of that. Will check it out when I finalize the hardware installation.

I see that there was a new version of the br24 plugin released today. What are the changes compared to the 1.3.0 release?

Cheers, ....Erik.
Home

[Hakan]

Erik
Version 1.31 is, thanks to Douwe, a clean up and consists as of the list below.
Binaries on opencpn.org are 1.31 although the source link is not yet reflecting to same code.

Commit Summary

• Add m for meters to antenna height button
• Correction of heading error in radar only
• Changes to update all control values after change of channel
• Correction for multi sweep filter
• Use structures for OpenGL vertices. Save space, may be faster.
• Some cleaning
• Remove last remains of displaymode dialogue
• Fix emulator
• Update translations
• Version 1.31

Note, if not mentioned before:
To switch between overlay display and radar stand alone display, when heading is missed, use the Radar control box. The uppermost text field is a push button.


Håkan

[merrimac]

The source links, the github binary site, as well as the download page on opencpn.org now all reflect 1.31.

[merrimac]

Also I had a good live phone call with Douwe and we agreed that we need to be more careful when moving stuff to canboat/master. The problem with me not being able to accept Douwe's changes was that we had already started with Sean d'Epagnier's lovely shader code on master, and then found that it would need a lot more work.

So at that point the 'radarwindow' branch was started but with 'master' in a half-way state. Then when Douwe had the fixes on 1.3 ready it was difficult to merge back.

Anyway, I've now rolled back all those changes on master, and canboat/master is now the same as douwefokkema/master, and is tagged as release v1.31. This also makes it easy to download a source zip, b.t.w.

All work will now move to the radarwindow branch, which is turning out to be a lot of work but it is really cool in both coding and functionality sense.

We're still seeing some nasty bugs especially on Windows with the "docking" code, but here is a screenshot of what it can do:





As you can see you can have 2 windows plus overlay on at the same time, with the 2 windows displaying two ranges. Both ranges can have their own guard zones, for four guard zones in total. You can have one on North Up and the other on Head Up, or both the same way, whatever you prefer.

The separate windows have range rings and compass data shown. Since they are not overlayed over the chart the data will show up even when there is no compass heading input (why you would be able to afford a computer and a radar scanner but not a compass is a different question.)

The radar windows can be "docked" to the side or bottom of the chart window, or be on separate windows. Having them docked is nice as it means they move with the OpenCPN chart display and they won't get buried underneath. The separate display can be nice to use full screen (even nicer if you have 2 monitors!)

On decent hardware the shader code works nicely now which gives an improved "softer" image and shifts work from the CPU to the GPU.


Notice how the shader makes the radar data less pixelated.

Once we get a few more bugs fixed we can start shooting out compiled test DLLs for Windows (I take it that Linux users are smart enough to compile their own.)