IGCAnalyse

The program tries to extract average circling positions from igc files. These positions may be close to thermals.

Some results for the PACA region in France:

(These files only contain the 177 most common positions found in about 1 GB of data)

cup file

kmz file

Usage

Compile using maven:

mvn package

Run:

java -jar target/igcanalyse-[version].jar [options]

Options:

-h
--help             display help screen

-i <str>           set the path that contains the flight logs

--max-count <int>  set the maximum number of thermals to keep
--min <int>        set the minimum amount of times a thermal has been found to be kept
--cup <str>        set the output file for the cup file (if not set no cup file will be written)
--kml <str>        set the output file for the kml file (if not set no kml file will be written)
--json <str>       set the output file for the json file (if not set no json file will be written)
--load-json <str>  set the path to load a json file
--bin <str>        set the output file for the bin file (if not set no bin file will be written)
--load-bin <str>   set the path to load a bin file
                   (the bin file format is just java serialization)
--load-cub <str>   expects a path to a cup file containing thermals. This has to
                   be a file written by this program or else it will fail
                   (note: errors will not be handled well)
                   So if you use this option be careful only to use non-modified cup
                   files written only by this program

The -i options sets the path where the igc flight data is located. The path will be recursively walked through and every igc file inside the path will be analyzed.

The --max-count option sets the maximum number of thermals to keep in the result file and the --min option sets the minimum number of times a thermal has to be merged to be kept in the result file.

The results are written to the files given with the options --cup and --kml. The res.cup file can be used with a gps and the res.kml file can be opened with Google Earth. Note that the res.kml file requires the cylinder.dae file that can be found int the results directory to be in the same folder.

Both files can also be zipped together into a single file and then by changing the extension from .zip to .kmz the file can be opened with Google Earth without needing to keep track of 2 files.

I advise to use the binary format to store and to use this program to convert from one program to another. The binary format will generate smaller files and will be faster. Moreover, loading a cup file will generate wrong results due to rounding errors built into the file format. The json format is available and should give the same precision as the binary format but since it generates larger files it is probably better to only use it for interoperability between programs.