[Therion] Simple Android map software with export to Therion

Jenny Black jenelopy at gmail.com
Tue Aug 30 04:32:04 CEST 2016


Hi,

> It would be nice if any of you who have first hand experience with using the
> different android-alternatives could share your experiences.

I used topodroid for the first time this year. It was our first time
paperless surveying, so I can't compare it with pockettopo, sexytopo
or any of the other options, but compared with paper I thought it was
pretty good and I'd be keen to use it again.

We bought a cheap new android tablet, a 7 inch Huawei Mediapad for
NZ$119. This isn't waterproof so we bought a plastic lunch-box to
transport it through the cave, and a waterproof bag for use while
surveying. The 7 inch screen was plenty big enough, and great for
surveying walking size passage, but annoyingly big for SRT and
crawling-size (or smaller) passages. I think 4.5 and 5 inch android
phones are a similar price and would tuck inside your oversuit more
easily, and given you can zoom in and out, I suspect they'll be big
enough to use topodroid. The waterproof bag worked fine in dry and
drippy caves, as long as you squeezed the air out before sealing it.
In wetter passages (which were fortunately rare) once the bag got wet
on the outside it was much harder for topodroid to recognise my
drawing. I also found that I usually couldn't wear gloves, so ended up
with very cold hands surveying. I suspect fingerless gloves would
easily solve this, but I was reluctant to cut my gloves
mid-expedition! Battery life seemed to be fine, and it would last
multiple surveying trips.

I didn't find topodroid too hard to learn to use, and I'm really not a
geek (as my past mails to this list prove!). We did have a bit of a
learning curve to start with, but that was partly to do with us
getting used to the workflow of paperless surveying, and me learning
how to do notes (I've typically done instruments in the past).

That is not to say that there isn't room for improvement in topodroid,
and I hope sure it will evolve and improve over time. My two biggest
criticisms were:

1. In the end I found it most efficient to export the data in survex
format and the sketches as pngs (higher res would be better), then
re-drew them in therion. I know you can bring the drawings into
therion directly, but I would spend longer joining line-wall segments,
flipping them the right way round and smoothing them.

2. It is a shame that you can't see the rest of the cave (even if it
was just the centerline), just the survey you are in. At least you can
open up different surveys to check things, but it woudl eb nice to see
where other passage was in relation to your current survey.

There are a few other more minor things that could be better (e.g.
rotating air and water flow arrows is clunky, cross sections are
annoying, some of the icons are misleading etc) but these aren't a big
deal.

Thanks,
Jenny



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