Smoothing GRIB Data

In order to minimize the size of the data that come back from the GRIB requests, I am working on some smoothing feature for the GRIB viewer. This intends to render a smoothed view of the GRIB files, even if the cells are bigger than 1 degree by 1 degree. This smoothing can also happen along the time dimension, from one GRIB layer to another, which would allow a better routing.
The idea is to determine the four closest GRIB points, and smooth the wind speed and direction, geographically, and along time, in case the GRIB has several frames, and you request the wind data between two frames. On the right is a first test of such a smoothing. The red are the GRIB data, the blue are calculated by the smoothing algorithm.

3D Grib files

Still making progresses on the weather charts program. Now we can visualize the GRIB files over the globe...
I'm still fighting with the Lambert projection..., we'll get there. The soft is almost good to be released, as - let's say - developer preview.
Print capabilities have been added too.
The superimposition of the faxes works well for the Mercator projection, and this is the most important for now. Surface analysis below a 500mb chart are really kicking asses. Quite a neat tool.

Weather Assistant Software almost ready to be released

The Weather Assistant software is coming good, almost ready to be released as version 0.9...
The documentation - at least a first drop of the user manual - is already available.
Find it here.
In conjunction with SailFax, this will really help to read all the data we are able to receive from the boat.

Plot the boat on Google Maps

Preparing a way to plot the boat's position from the email, on the blog.
Here is a sneak preview of what can be expected...

SailFax, utility for SkedFile.txt

Almost done with SailFax. See a preview here.
Will soon be available for download.

More Software to come

Working on several applications around AirMail & GetFax.
The first one is a Graphical User Interface for SkedFile.txt, the one that is used by the automatic feature of GetMail.
The second is a viewer that will be able to stack the faxes received by GetFax, and a chart, on which you can display your position, way points, grib files, etc.
In other words, it gives the possibility to override a fax, with accurate geographical data, like position. You know in Lat and Long where you are on the fax.

New software available

New software is available on Don Pedro's software page.
It contains the GeomUtil (spheric calculation utilities), NMEAParser, NMEAViewer, NMEAHTTPLogger, ChartComponents, and GRIBViewer.

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Google Map APIs, that is cool stuff!

I had the opportunity to play a bit with the Google Map API, and it turned out to be pretty cool; we might be able to use and reuse it for our big trip.


As an example, I rendered our track during the Pacific Cup 2006...


You can even simulate some animations. The trick being not to reload the chart every time you want it to move... Play with the links on the right of the document linked above, and see for yourself.

Feeding the blog from email

This is a test, without any extra software, allowing us to send images to the blog via SailMail. It's a base64 encoded image, nicely rendered by good browsers, and not by Internet Explorer...
The utility I use is available here.

On line!

The BLOG has been created, in prevision of the trip.
This will be possible to post entries from the boat, through email.