I recently finished a proof-of-concept project with FrontierSI for creating some building blocks aimed at scaleable, programmatic quality assurance for hydrographic surveys. It was a fantastic opportunity to work on the foundations of some huge future projects on large scale hydrographic data collection. I set out thinking ‘great, I can PDAL all the things!’ –…
A method for offline entwine EPT viewing
So you made an Entwine point tile index and want to deliver it offline as a quick demonstration? Impress your friends, enemies and frenemies like this. You need: git python3 a non-safari web browser I’m using a MacOS 10.7 machine, and therefore assume you are also. The same set of instructions should work for any…
Making the MH370 map
I had a lot of fun making the feature image for my second open source point cloud infrastructure post – and I liked the map, so I thought I’d share the recipe. Unfortunately, it took a while because I decided to make it better! I hope I succeeded – I certainly had more fun and…
Web services: NCSS and WCS
This is a blog post about work I’ve done in a past role, but I’d like to get out to a wider audience. It’s about two different web services that do similar things: NetCDF subset service (NCSS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS). I hope it also helps to act as a short guide on making…
Experiments with Anafi – and point cloud infrastructure part 3
This is both a consumer grade RPAS (remotely piloted airborne system) write-up, and part 3 of the ‘open source point cloud infrastructure’ series (see part 1 and part 2) – looking at much smaller scale data produced by consumer (and other) RPAS systems using cameras. The story starts with purchasing a tiny airplane to support…
LiDAR basics – tutorial building
I’ve just wrapped up a small job refreshing teaching materials for the Australian National University Centre for Water and Landscape Dynamics – an innovative group using remote sensing tech to address landscape-scale analysis of things that matter for assessing the state of the environment (see, for example: http://wald.anu.edu.au/data_services/data/continuous-and-comprehensive-national-environmental-reporting-australias-environment/). The task? convert a MATLAB and ArcGIS-based…
Cartocrafting
Digging deep into my my own history here, I left high school full of confidence that I would become an illustrator and spend my life drawing things for science! I didn’t make the cut for art school. And went to science instead – there’s a long story about why I didn’t just leap straight into…
An open source point cloud infrastructure part 2: oceans
If you haven’t read part 1 of this miniseries, go take a look. To really briefly summarise, it tells a short backstory about why the PDAL + Entwine needs to be on the radar for anyone considering massive point-cloud based data management; and provides a couple of terrestrial examples. Here, we tackle hydrography. The GEBCO…
An open source point cloud data infrastructure: introduction, and land.
I’ve recently been exploring the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL) and Entwine ecosystem a lot. For work, and for proving some ideas that have been kicking around for a few years now (see my EGU poster from 2016, or FOSS4G talk in 2017). These are not new ideas – other people have had them for…
FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018
In late November 2018 the inaugural FOSS4G SotM Oceania conference took place – as one of the organisers it is still completely surreal that it was real, and we made it happen! To me, it feels now as if a few enthusiastic people had a conversation about a year ago, someone waved a magic wand,…