Le Petit Poucet 0.0.5 review

Le Petit Poucet is free software to display and edit GPS routes and tracks in a 3D scene

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Antoine Hue

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Le Petit Poucet is free software to display and edit GPS routes and tracks in a 3D scene. The aim of Le Petit Poucet is to build the scene around the GPS data and 2D maps or 3D terrain models.

Apart from being techies, we are outdoor sport lovers and want to prepare our outings and show them to our friends and families. We hope you will find Le Petit Poucet useful. The objective statement being laid, here is the reality and roadmap.

Current version is a pre-alpha version numbered 0.0.2, it is dedicated to David Thompson a great explorer of western Canada. He is been surveying the wild land for 28 years and he is the first person to complete a survey of the Columbia River.

Le Petit Poucet is now able to read a lot of GPS file formats and to connect to the GPS receivers thanks to GPSBabel. It is also able to mix coordinate systems in projected or earth centric referentials.

Currently. Le Petit Poucet is called from the terminal, see command line manual or type the -h or --help option to get the command line usage. We hope to provide quickly a graphical user interface. The program has been compiled and run on Linux (Intel) and Mac Os X (v 10.3), it should work on many other platforms as the core libraries (Open Scene Graph, GPSBabel and GDAL) are portable.

Here are some key features of "Le Petit Poucet":
Main features

Loading of tracks or routes, independent waypoints and maps or terrain models and display them on a 3D scene.
Support of many GPS data file formats through GPSBabel or custom parsers.
Download GPS receiver data via Serial or USB port.
3D navigation based on continuous zoom, swivel and pan with excellent real time anti-aliasing.
Mixing of several coordinate systems (e.g.: geocentric and projected, UTM and Lambert).
Coordinate system selection from command line.

Tracks

Tracks are shown as a set of track segments. Track segments are sets of waypoints connected with a line.
Track segments are not connected but share the same color and input coordinate system.
Multiple tracks are shown in a viewer, track color is automatically chosen to visually distinguish tracks.

Waypoints

Waypoints are displayed as a 3D symbol plus a text in case of named waypoint.
Name text is automatically oriented toward screen and font size is adjusted dynamically too.
Text color is selected from command line
Waypoint information (location, elevation and time) is displayed in a head up display (HUD) when mouse flies over the point.
Waypoint symbol is loaded from file
Feature points, i.e. point out of a track, are selected. Are shown only the ones that are in the area of the displayed maps and tracks.

Maps

2D Maps are displayed in 3D perspective with box subtrat.PC
Map loading is currently only supported for the Carte Sur Table file format.
Map elevation in the 3D scene is computed based on the minimum elevation of the loaded tracks to reduce perspective effects.
For tracks without maps a box is displayed below the track to improve perspective.
In the current version, loading of 3D terrain model is through Open Scene Graph (OSG). Models must be projected and optimized using OSG utilities like osgdem see Loading Blue Marble.

What's New in This Release:
The main improvement compared to 0.0.4 is a smooth integration of the Earth.
Earth is automatically insterted into the scene using Blue Marble Next Generation data from NASA.
The mouse interface was completly revamped and customized to handle Earth-centric scenes as well as projected ones.
Other less significant improvements like text readability have been integrated to this version.
Many other bugs have been solved.