Tekmap Software

Bug Fixes

The latest release of SonarWave Lite includes a couple of bug fixes.

1. If the XTF file only contained sub-bottom data it would load but not display the image data. This has been fixed in the new release.
2. If the XTF file contained different range or sample values between pings the viewer would report an error and exit. This bug has been fixed in the new release.

Incremental File Loading

A new feature with SonarWave Lite includes the option to incrementally load an XTF file. This option has been added for computers that may have hardware limitations loading large files, and users who simply want to load XTF data in smaller sections.

The updated viewer includes an option to set the maximum number of pings that can be loaded at one time. The default setting is 10000 pings. This can be increased or decreased according to the users preferences. If a file has more pings than the above preference, a dialog box allows the user to drag and select the ping range to load in the viewer.

Choose Pings dialog box

To select a range of pings to view, simply click and drag. the start and stop pings are displayed below the selection bar. After the file is loaded a new button  for loading additional pings is active in the toolbar.

Additional pings can also be loaded from the View menu. Selecting either the button or the View menu option will bring up the Choose Pings dialog where the user can select a new range of pings to view.

Goto the download page to obtain the latest version of SonarWave Lite .

Introduction

The p.in.labels program is a simple import tool for converting XYZ files to GRASS label files. The Z column of the XYZ file is read as the GRASS label. The program reads the XYZ file from either standard input (stdin) or an existing ASCII file.

The standard GRASS label options are available including size, fontsize, offset, color, justification, and rotation.

Example

To import the following XYZ labels from labels.txt  into GRASS

572353.90 5406935.12 Label 1
579691.25 5423610.90 Label 2
601036.25 5421076.18 Station 5 — data description
601303.06 5435750.87 23

use the following command:

p.in.labels input=labels.txt output=label_file fontsize=8

d.labels labels=label_file

Building Source

1. Download the source tarball here p.in.labels (37)
2. Extract the tar file in the GRASS(v.6) source tree in the misc directory
3. Change to the p.in.labels directory
4. Run make to build the program

ToDo

• Add column field separator option
• Read size and rotation options from input file or stream
• Probably more …

Introduction

The r.out.colorbar program is a simple export tool for saving GRASS raster colorbars. The program uses GTK+ and CairoGraphics to handle the image output.

Vertical Colorbar

Horizontal Colorbar

The colorbar is saved at a user defined size (in pixels) and orientation. The user can choose between 3 output formats supported by Cairo.

The output formats are:

1. PNG Image with transparent background
2. PDF document
3. Encapsulated Postscript (EPS)

Requirements

The GTK+ development package must be installed in order to build r.out.colorbar. The Makefile uses:

pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0

and

pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0

Building Source

1. Download the source tarball here r.out.colorbar (50)
2. Extract the tar file in the GRASS(v.6) source tree in the raster directory
3. Change to the r.out.colorbar directory
4. Run make to build the program

ToDo

• Include category label support
• Include custom labeling
• Include units labeling
• Add font options

Tekmap Consulting has added multi-thread support to the GTK+ MB-System interface.  Processing time is greatly reduced by running select mb-system commands in separate threads. The mb-system commands include:

• mbbackangle
• mbprocess

These programs require very little system memory, and do not take too much CPU time. By placing them in multiple managed threads, the processing time for a block of multibeam files is significantly reduced.

From the Rectification Control Points module in GTK+ GRASS the user can edit and manually enter control points.

Rectification Control Points

From this menu the user can:

• Turn control points on or off.
• Highlight the selected control point on the display.
• Check the Root Mean Square (RMS) error for the selected points.
• Manually enter known control points.
• Automatically project manually entered geographic coordinates to the users coordinate system (e.g. UTM).

This is a useful option for selecting geographic graticules on scanned maps.

The control points can be saved to a re-loadable XML points file. The XML file includes the image name, location and format, plus the complete list of control points. Using this format the image and control points can be easily re-loaded in a single step. The following is a sample control points XML file …
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A rectification Control Points module is added to the GTK+ GRASS Interface to make selecting and manipulating control points easier.

Image Rectification Window

The Control Points window opens in the GRASS Interface, as a special, split-pane, tabbed window. Users can select rectification control points for a GRASS raster file or an external image. Control points are saved to an XML file with optional output to a gdal_translate compatible file.

Features

The features for the Control Points Rectification module include:

• Control point selection for both GRASS rasters and external image files (TIFF, PNG, etc).
• Image file name and type, plus selected control points saved to a simple XML file.
• Control points selection from existing GRASS rasters and vectors or manually entered points.
• Control points manually entered from geographic coordinates or from the user’s projection coordinates (eg. UTM).
• Edit menu that displays RMS for selected points based on the chosen rectification order.
• Edit menu that lets users turn control points on or off.
• Predicted location for a selected point that displays in both panes to help users locate control points.
• Full zoom and pan functions for both panes in the rectification tab window.

Introduction

The r.in.mb GRASS/Mb-Stystem program is designed to import mbio compatible multibeam data directly into the GRASS GIS.
The program is a modified version of r.in.xyz. Instead of reading an ASCII XYZ file, r.in.mb reads an MB-System compatible list file as shown below.

/data1/MULTIBEAM_DATA/RAW2007/07_Pingos_JD245_RAW/0050_20070902_
154139_Petrel.all 56 1.0
/data1/MULTIBEAM_DATA/RAW2007/07_Pingos_JD245_RAW/0051_20070902_
155508_Petrel.all 56 1.0
/data1/MULTIBEAM_DATA/RAW2007/07_Pingos_JD245_RAW/0052_20070902_
161050_Petrel.all 56 1.0

…

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One reason for developing the GTK MB-System interface was the need for a cross-platform interface to the MB-System mbio library. GTK MB-System has been built for and run on a Windows® system. The software was cross-compiled on a Linux x32 system using the tools from MinGW.

The following are the brief notes kept for setting up the cross-compile environment, and building the MB-System mbio library and the GTK MB-System interface. These notes are over a year old, so some of the instructions may a out of date.

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