Software Googleearth

The Basics

Google Earth is a very powerful, free 3d map program that works on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
It is a perfect program for RISE because almost any laptop can run it, and it's fairly simple to feed Google Earth KML data so that we can track the balloon's position in real time.

Helpful Links

Homepage: http://earth.google.com/
Download: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
How It Works: http://www.howstuffworks.com/google-earth.htm
Easy Caching of Launch area: http://destinsharks.com/google-earth-maps/162#more-162

Using Google Earth Offline

  • Make sure you have a large cache size enabled! Go to tools; options; cache; and choose the largest size your hard drive can handle. The maximum size is 2000 MB.

Using Google Earth in Linux for live position tracking

  • Make sure the usbserial module is loaded into your kernel: #modprobe usbserial
  • Plug in a usb to serial converter
  • Find out the device name # ls -l /dev/ttyU* (The computer will return something like /dev/ttyUSB1, which we'll need for the next steps)
  • Connect your radio to the usb to serial converter, turn it on, set up the TNC
  • Make sure the radio is talking to your computer. Generally this is the buggiest step, and may require restarting the terminal, or the radio, or resetting the TNC of the radio, many times before it decides to work. If things are working, # cat /dev/ttyUSB? (where ? is found by the previous command) will display APRS data on the terminal. Sweet
  • # cat /dev/ttyUSB? > /arbitrary_folder/arbitrary_file (This will write APRS data to an arbitrary file as the radio receives it.)
  • Technically, a file with APRS data is all we need to find the balloon, but it's not very exiting. Next, we want to get Google Earth to display this data in real time.
  • We need a server to convert APRS data to KML data and send the data to Google Earth
  • Download ….

Google Add Ons

KML Files

KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth and Google Maps.

Page tags: googleearth mapping software tracking