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Welcome to the OGN-Flight-Logger_V2 wiki!

Python APRS/OGN program to log flight times, durations and maximum heights achieved. It can also optionally record flight tracks, send emails when flights take off or land, determine which tug aircraft has been used to launch a glider.

This python program creates an SQlite db of flights from a given location and aircraft list (the later two parameters are to be be developed into a more generalised format).

At the moment this is very much 'in development'

To install OGN Flight Logger the following prerequisites are required (see requirements.txt for specific details)

python-tz
sqlite3
libfap (Note this is the "C" library libfap, not the python module libfap.py)
ephem
goecoder
geopy
requests
aerofiles

To run flogger first set up the parameters in settings.py then call 'flogger.py'. Flogger.py will run continuously (perhaps it should be a 'service'?) logging flights during day, ie between sunrise and sunset. After sunset it processes the days log to determine which log entries constitute actual flights and those which are ground movements etc. Once all the flights have been generated into the 'flights' table and the days flights dumped as a .csv file, flogger determines when the next sunrise time and sleeps until then, ie waits.

OGN-Flight-Logger must be called using: python flogger.py your_username your_passcode, where you_username and your_passcode can be created on http://http://www.george-smart.co.uk/wiki/APRS_Callpass If a valid username and passcode are not suppled it will exit immediately.

If installing on an arm based system this can be achieved by:

sudo apt-get install python-tz sqlite3
wget http://www.pakettiradio.net/downloads/libfap/1.5/libfap6_1.5_armhf.deb

sudo dpkg -i libfap*.deb

sudo apt-get install pythonX-dev where X is version of python being used
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install pyephem
sudo pip install geopy
sudo pip install geocoder
sudo pip install aerofiles

I'm currently developing and testing on

a Raspberry Pi P2 Model B under Rasparian (Debian Linux 7.8) and
a desktop running Kubuntu 14.04

Flogger has been updated to optionally record flight tracks and output these as .gpx files. This enhancement is still in development. This feature is controlled in the settings.py file

Flogger will now optionally take inputs from upto 4 base stations. It also has an option to delete flight and track .csv files after they are "n" days old. Track points are sorted and output to .csv files based on the logged time from the Flarm unit itself (assumes Flarms use GPS time in each trackpoint). This is to over come a potential issue using multiple base stations when the track points might not be received in the same time order as they were sent from the flarm units.

This now in the latter stages of development, it still logs a lot of test output but his will eventually be controlled by an option from the cmd line and/or configuration file

9th March 2016 Added an option to output IGC format track files. This requires aerofiles.py to be installed (see above). Several optional fields in the header are set to "Not recorded" as these can not be known by OGN Flogger, however if this data was input prior to launch it could, but that's another development..... Note the files output are not 'certified'.

Added an option to specify number of hours before sunset that processing the flight logs should commence.

Added an option to send the daily flight log to a specified email address in .csv format. The cmd line form is: flogger.py username passcode mode [-s|--smtp email address of smtp server] [-t|--tx email address of sender] [-r|--rx email address of receiver]

If -s|--smtp is provided then -t|--tx and -r|--rx must be provided

Included option to send email if flight lands outside the take off airfield. This initial version just uses a circular boundary of a specifiable radius. Code is included to send an SMS msg but has not been tested.

20160914 - Added option to determine which tug used for a launch, if any, plus release height.