HomebrewFMS starting to take shape
Thursday 2 September 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized
Because I clearly don’t have enough stuff on the go currently, I’ve started hacking on a tool to help with my flying – a flight management system to run on my HTC Touch 2. Yes, these kind of things exist already, but they tend to have at least one fatal flaw: extreme cost, extreme slowness, extreme lack of freedom (which I care about far more than cost) or just plain incorrect data for NZ. By “incorrect data”, I mean really basic things like placing the runways at the right aerodromes. This has since been fixed for NZFI/NZDV in PocketFMS. If you like closed-source proprietary software, and don’t mind bad performance, perhaps you should check it out: http://www.pocketfms.com/
So far, I have a toy tile renderer which should accept local or remote tiles from GM [both MT and KH servers], OSM, and possibly others; a KML polygon renderer for airspaces; georeferenced sprite support; nice font outlining for contrast; a primitive HSI, and a few other little bits. The data is all converted from CAA’s downloadable PDFs.
Here’s some screenshots of it running in the test environment:
And one (crap photo) of the renderer limping along on the crippled GDI of Windows Mobile:
Next steps:
- Uncrapify the mobile renderer
- Render correct runways rather than using my generic aerodrome sprite
- Do something about the clutter of VRPs
- Stop using GM tiles, since that’s technically against their TOS.
- Display aircraft track
- Display tags for airspace info, etc
- Provide audio and visual alerts on approaching controlled airspace, etc
2010-09-02 » admin