Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Waterluvian 2101 days ago
Delighted to see more experimentation with QGIS and real time data.

As an example of another approach that doesn’t need the intermediate csv file and has a much cleaner “refresh”, I made an adapter plugin that accesses real-time robot data via ROS: https://github.com/locusrobotics/qgis_ros

The ability to extend QGIS because of the C++ and Python APIs is immensely powerful.
2 comments
Stubb 2101 days ago
Is QGIS the go-to app for visualization of position data like this?

Can it send commands back to the app from which it's receiving position data? Things like pause/play and adjusting the time being displayed?

link
Waterluvian 2101 days ago
In this case I interface with ROS in Python so yes it could just by wiring the Python together from both ends.

QGIS is kind of the go-to app if you want to do serious geospatial data analysis. As for _visualization_, I'm not sure. There's probably better options for many domains. For ROS there's RVIZ, but the ROS community's spatial analytical tools are fairly immature.

link
chmod775 2101 days ago
From what I gather it's pretty damn far from the typical use-case of a GIS tool but still a cool experiment. I have no idea how it could be useful like this either.

If you could however do some number crunching using historical data to display things like average air traffic density and routes, it might become useful.

link
geomatics99 2101 days ago
That's great. Thanks for sharing. Would be very interesting to see robotics and geospatial application combination
link
Waterluvian 2101 days ago
No problem! Yes, I've been equal measures frustrated that I see so little geomatics utilized in ROS and excited to explore it.

It's a bit bewildering that there hasn't been any traction for the robotics community to use more GIS. It's a match made in heaven.

There's examples in the presentation linked in the git repo if you're interested.

link