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20040315: IDV Development

>From: Mike Masscotte <address@hidden>
>Organization: Embry-Riddle
>Keywords: 200403151809.i2FI9HrV002473  IDV probe

Hi Mike-

>My name is Mike Masscotte and I work at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical 
>University in the Air Traffic Management Research Lab.  I'm working 
>along with Dr Chris Herbster in a project to integrate aircraft 
>positions and weather using the IDV.  I'm looking for some assistance in 
>getting started with this project.

Okay, that's what we're here for.

>What I would like to do is have the user select off the menu a  'Load 
>aircraft'  choice, which would fire off a method that would read through 
>a file of aircraft data and then plot the aircraft.

What's the format of this aircraft data?  Is it a time series of
positions of one aircraft, or is it the single positions of a bunch
of aircraft.

>Right now, the way I'm thinking of accomplishing this is create an 
>"Aircraft" class that would generate a 3-D model of an airplane and 
>drawing this onto the canvas.

We already have a shape for an aircraft that could be used for
what you want (I think).  Depending on the format of the data,
the best way to accomplish this would be to create a DisplayControl
that has a SelectorPoint as it's display.  The data would be the position
of the aircraft and you would pass in the shape created by 
ucar.visad.ShapeUtility.makeShape(ShapeUtility.AIRPLANE) when
creating the SelectorPoint.  

>The questions I have are:
>
>How could I draw directly onto the 3-D canvas of the IDV?

I would avoid this and instead use the existing IDV framework.

>Are there functions already built into the IDV that would convert 
>lat-lon-alt to X-Y screen coordinates?

If your data is in lat/lon/alt, the probe will be properly positioned
in XYZ space in the display.

>I'm fairly new to working with Java3D and this is my first time 
>traversing the source code of the IDV so I am open to any suggestions on 
>an easier way if you know of one or how someone may have already done 
>this in the past.  I'm using the latest version of the IDV (1.1b3).

It's always good to use the latest version. ;-)  We are in the process
of writing documentation for developers and this is a good use case.,
I'm cc'ing Jeff McWhirter (one of the IDV developers) on this since
he's the one writing the docs.  He is also the chief architect of the
framework, so might have ideas on how you would accomplish what you
want.

>Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

I'm sure the above explanation is not complete, so please digest it
and let us know if you have further questions.

Don Murray
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Date:    Tue, 16 Mar 2004 16:12:29 EST
To:      Unidata Support <address@hidden>
cc:      address@hidden, address@hidden
From:    Mike Masscotte <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: 20040315: IDV Development

Don,

Great! I think I'm getting into the swing of how the IDV works.  I can 
now get aircraft into the display using the method you described.  With 
a bit of tweaking I should be able to get the look I'm after.

Thanks for your help
-Mike