Saturday, October 22, 2011

Marble: elevation profile for route

I want to present a new feature that got added to Marble recently: an elevation profile generated from SRTM data for calculated routes.
I had personal interest in adding this feature: I do quite a lot of bicycling and when planning routes I need to know the total elevation I have to go up - to compare with alternative routes and to estimate the length of the ride. Additionally a graph that shows the steepest parts of the route is helpful.
But now the obligatory Screenshots:
Viewing the elevation profile of a route

Viewing a detail of the route
Unfortunately Florian worked on basically the same feature in paralell - because my work was "hidden" in my git clone. But we decided to join forces and took his FloatItem and my elevation loading code to have the best from both developments. So all credits of the above screenshots actually go to Florian.

Some words about the elevation data:
I converted the NASA SRTM3 data into png tiles which can be loaded by Marble using the standard TileLoader - so all the caching, scaling, reloading and so on could be reused. I uploaded the tiles to files.kde.org - thanks to the sysadmins for providing this server - so we don't depend on NASA for the data.

On the todo list are features like showing elevation profile for opened tracks and adding more statistics about opened tracks.

Oh, and Happy Birthday KDE!

7 comments:

  1. This looks really great! And even my hometown is shown on the map. Have you already been cycling in this region? I'd really recommend this route :)

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  2. @LuHe: funny, what a small world :D
    Yes, a weeks ago I rode that route. It was a bit exhausting because of the wind...

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  3. This article is unique and interesting. thanks for your share. I have been meaning to write something like this on my website and you have given me an idea.

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