Just returned from Matienzo exedition in Spain using a DistoX with PocketTopo on a Windows Mobile PDA. I found it to be a very powerful and time saving way to survey. Sketching underground is still the rate limiting step, but being able to extract the data (into Survex in my case) and get a scale survey printed out within minutes after the trip was superb. My tool for getting existing Survex data into PocketTopo, and getting data from the surveying trip into Survex from the PDA is detailed here: http://www.darkgem.com/wscc/caving-talk/index.php?title=CaveSurveyDataConver... Footleg 2009/4/20 Wookey <wookey@wookware.org>
+++ Guido Verhoeven [2009-04-20 13:27 +0200]:
Hello
Do you know about Auriga from Luc Le Blanc? This runs on a Palm. (see: [1]http://www.speleo.qc.ca/auriga/)
Yes. At the CSG meet yesterday we used a distoX with both Auriga and pockettopo, and compared with a SAP+Disto and conventional instruments. i.e we surveyed the same route 4 times with 4 methods/teams at once and had 6 laser measures on one trip :-)
I also worked on the data import from pockettopo to Therion (not quite finished), as a variation on the existing pt2pdf script. I have not yet tried the auriga import because I failed to extract data from it.
This work will be reported in in more detail in Compass Points, but various issues arose to do with platform support, calibration, bluetooth syncing, data transfer, distoX-disto integration, auriga focus bug and data import. The SAP/conventional surveyors were still much faster by the time we had made all our computers work, but even so the process, especially with pockettopo, is very powerful and promising, and is clearly the way to go. But it does still need a bit of work to reduce the pain and faffing :-)
Thanks to all involved for very useful excercise and especially Svein and Torsten for bringing lots of cool toys from Norway.
Wookey -- Principal hats: iEndian - Balloonboard - Toby Churchill - Emdebian http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk http://mailman.speleo.sk/mailman/listinfo/therion