[Xastir] Saving serial snapshots

[Curt, WE7U]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Jim Tolbert wrote:

> What I (think I) want is to be able to replay a search at high speed (2 sec = 
> 5 minutes or something like that).  I currently have 4 GPS trackers for SAR 
> and want to eventually have about 20. 
> I think I want a slide show.  Then I could adjust the timing for the 
> slideshow to show the progression of the tracks.  When I use the play back of 
> the log files.  I get all the points showing up sequentially but quite rapid 
> and then the point labels going away being replaced by a colored track.

I was kind'a thinking that you might want a slideshow type of thing
to further your APRS tracking agenda (indoctrinate?).


> The VCR mode sounds great, but I suppose the easier way to do it will be to 
> use a script.   So....  ( and here is a stupid question ) a quick look in my 
> openSUSE book doesn't have much about scripts....  do I want a PERL book?

Do you really want to get into programming?  Perl is a programming
language.  It's very good for some things.  I use it for a lot of
shell scripting purposes so that I don't have to write in C-Shell,
BASH, Bourne Shell, Korn Shell and others, but only have to learn
one language for such things.  I use it for some smaller and a few
intermediate-sized programs as well that would normally not be
considered shell programming tasks.

It'd probably be easier if one (or more) of us worked on something
that would serve your purposes.  Do you have Perl available on your
Xastir box you'll be using for the exercise?

What frequency of updates for the snapshots are you after?  Would it
work to just control the snapshot rate from the slider in Xastir,
and have a Perl script monitoring for new "snapshot.png" files in
the directory and copying/renaming them as they appear?  If so,
that's not super hard to accomplish.  Xastir can do snapshots every
minute or any number of minutes in between them up to 30 minutes
between, without modifying Xastir sources.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
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