[Xastir] Saving serial snapshots

[Curt, WE7U]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Jim Tolbert wrote:

>> On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, Jim Tolbert wrote:
>> 
>>> I think I remember someone describing a method of saving serial png 
>>> snapshots.  I have searched all the saved posting that I have, but have 
>>> not come up with it.  Could someone repost or redirect  me to it?
>> 
>> If you mean saving snapshots so that you could play them back as a
>> movie later or something, you'd have to write a script that would
>> rename them in sequence after they were written by Xastir.  Each one
>> gets written to the same name as-is.
>> 
>> Or you could modify Xastir source code to name them based on the
>> date/time so that each was different.
>> 
>> 
> What would be the best way?  Would it be difficult?  How should I attack it? 
> I have my openSUSE 11.0 Bible manual out and getting ready to go. 
> I should have it done by morning......  Ignorance is bliss! <grin> 
> Seriously, though.... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Tell us what you want to do.

Is saving/playing back the log files good enough?  You can then
bring them back in and see the tracks quickly at any time.  No code
changes needed.

It wouldn't be hard to slow the reading in of the log files down to
more easily see the movement of the objects.  This would take a
relatively small code change.

Someday we could perhaps implement reading in of the timestamps in
the log files so that we could more accurately do a *10 or a *2 type
of facility, speeding up real-time by a multiplier but keeping the
pauses between updates accurate relative to each other.  It'd be
great to be able to go forward or backward at any speed, like a
professional VCR can do for video.  I can think of a very special
use for that which would be cool.  These ideas would require much
more code.

If you want to save screen images we can help you do that as well,
but it'll be more error-prone and take up a bunch of disk for the
images.  It would require a Perl script (or similar) to copy/rename
the snapshot files as they appeared, and you would have to make sure
that Perl script kept running during the length of your exercise.
Or:  This could be accomplished with code changes in Xastir as well
but would require developer time for implementation and testing.
I'd rather not do this inside Xastir as it would have relatively few
uses.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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