30 Second Functions

When is it faster to write the function than to even find out how to do it in the help.  Well ok, I did actually search and didn't find out how, but here is what would have been faster.

I use handwheels,  I wanted an easy way to switch the z input from the footdisk to the right handwheel and back.  There is probably a way to pass an argument into a macro but I couldn't find it so enter....

zhand.py

print 'z handwheel'
VrCfg().SetHwLocZ (2)

The beauty of VrCfg is that it modifies the environment in real time just like calling any of the functions that would do the same thing via a dialog box.

Saying anything else would just not have a point, except, always be thinking of ways to extend the usefulness of existing processes.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

Talking to a friend the other day it occurred to me how fantastic it would be if Vr could import and display OpenStreetMap data.  Nothing fancy mind you but maybe create an image that you could use as a background for a quick check of the surrounding area or even flight prep.  Wow that sounds like a lot of work unless of course someone else has already done it.  One of the many beauties of Python is the number of fantastic libraries out there if you just spend a little time tracking them down.  If you take that a step farther and are willing to pass a little of the responsibility outside python using system calls or batch files the possibilities are nearly endless.  Let's just say I can now display an OpenStreetMap map image in Vr and it only took about 90 lines of python.  Here are a few of the major helpers besides the map site which is so worthy of support, contribution, and praise.

I know I have mentioned it before but I can't say enough about pyproj which I use to convert my local coordinates to geographic for sending out to various places.

Once I have the corners in Lat / Long the rest will be done by a batch file which is about the only thing my python script creates.  It could be done in other ways but I liked the idea of creating something that could stick around and be easily modified for use again.  So the batch file next makes a call to the openstreetmap.org API for grabbing the map data.

Once the OSM file is in house it will be converted to a bitmap using Maperitive.  I only use such a tiny fraction of the capabilities of this amazing program, but for my purposes using it's command line version with a custom generated script will fit the bill perfectly.

The original bitmap is created in Web Mercator and can also throw in a TFW and KML file for generic use or display by anybody if you want to send them along.  I however want to display it behind my map in a local coordinate system in whatever system I choose so the last step is to re-project the image using GDAL.

Is this the most advanced, professional, elegant way of doing it?  Of course not, you obviously don't know me very well.  As usual it is something you can hack together in just a short time with minimal duplication of effort that gets the job done.  Hooray for real programmers!!!

Don't forget to support your favorite projects with contributions or cash when possible.

Note to self: Step backward through LiDAR when removing, and repr ( round ( a number )) is awsome

First, apparently I never noticed this before but while trying to step though a bunch of LiDAR points to remove a certain class it apparently changes something dynamically (like the point number in the buffer).  I noticed this because I was doing a

    for PointNum in range(Punt.GetCount()):
        if Punt.Cla(PointNum) == Whatever:
            Punt.DelPunt(PointNum)

To get rid of a certain type of point, in this case based on class.  What I noticed though was that each time it ran there were a bunch of points left over (half??).  I decided that even though I wasn't doing a record until the loop was done, the point number in the buffer must change as points are deleted.  So what to do?  How about starting at the last point and removing them from the top end of the buffer so as you work backwards the previous point numbers would not have changed.  I came up with

for PointNum in range(Punt.GetCount(),-1,-1):

and it seems to work fine.

Second and totally unrelated I needed to rebuild a tile naming structure for a local dataset.  There is a tile scheme that is based on 5000 foot tiles that is easy enough to get the names of.  The problem is that there is also a subset of 1250 foot tiles that starts from the corner of each 5k block but the names are based on 1000 foot increments.  When you digitize a random point in a block you can't necessarily round down to the lower 1000 because they just truncate the thousands from a rounded 1250.  Ok hard to imagine but the corners would be 0, 1250, 2500, 3750 so a number 3749 would fall in a 2500 block and truncate to 2000 meaning the tile would have 2 in the name, not to mention dropping a million off one of the coordinates.  Now for the why I love python part!

repr(round(1773691/1250)*1250)[1:4]

yields '772' just like is necessary to build the proper tile name.