Top Hat Question (XCSoar?)

Chip
If you can't get your tophat to work, I recommend just springing for a few bucks and getting a Oudie with SYM already loaded and running.
There not cheap but it works and it works good, never locks up and gets funky in flight.
Connected to a PowerFlarm it is a powerful idiot proof device with great support.
Fly Safe and good luck

On Friday, July 6, 2018 at 6:53:36 AM UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
Chip
If you can't get your tophat to work, I recommend just springing for a few bucks and getting a Oudie with SYM already loaded and running.
There not cheap but it works and it works good, never locks up and gets funky in flight.
Connected to a PowerFlarm it is a powerful idiot proof device with great support.
Fly Safe and good luck

I will argue with that. SYM is a huge step back from either XCSoar or TopHat…

I will argue with that. SYM is a huge step back from either XCSoar or TopHat…

Based on my and other reported experiences, I think the best system is whatever you are comfortable with and is reliable. I've seen problems reported with a variety of hardware and software. I'm in the IT business and it's amazing to me that this stuff works as well as it does given the low volumes, whether it's commercial products like ClearNav or freeware such as Top Hat/XCSoar.

I've been flying with Top Hat for several years. Rob Dunning has responded multiple times with fixes and responses to requests. I think I know where the remaining bugs are (none of these applications is perfect) and have confidence that it's giving me what I need. Functionally, it does nearly everything I want it to do and I have workarounds for the gaps. I'm just trying to close some of those gaps.

I'm sure SYM and the Oudie are fine but I've played with both and am not tempted to enter another "relationship" now.

Chip Bearden

On Fri, 06 Jul 2018 08:54:40 -0700, chip.bearden wrote:

Based on my and other reported experiences, I think the best system is
whatever you are comfortable with and is reliable. I've seen problems
reported with a variety of hardware and software. I'm in the IT business
and it's amazing to me that this stuff works as well as it does given
the low volumes, whether it's commercial products like ClearNav or
freeware such as Top Hat/XCSoar.

I was also in the IT business, now retired. I think a major reason this
stuff works as well as it does is that the developers are (all?) also
active users of this stuff. That is not knocking professional developers,
just pointing out that they are seldom active users of what they write
and IMO this factor makes a huge difference, especially to usability and
GUI design.

I flew with XCSoar for a few years, but switched to LK8000 whe nit
appeared because I prefer its user interface, which took less effort to
set up the way I want it that XCSoar did, and on a good day with no
weather or airspace issues to force changes of plan I won't touch it from
launch to landing. I've looked at SYM but prefer LK8000.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Friday, July 6, 2018 at 12:36:03 PM UTC-6, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jul 2018 08:54:40 -0700, chip.bearden wrote:

Based on my and other reported experiences, I think the best system is
whatever you are comfortable with and is reliable. I've seen problems
reported with a variety of hardware and software. I'm in the IT business
and it's amazing to me that this stuff works as well as it does given
the low volumes, whether it's commercial products like ClearNav or
freeware such as Top Hat/XCSoar.

I was also in the IT business, now retired. I think a major reason this
stuff works as well as it does is that the developers are (all?) also
active users of this stuff. That is not knocking professional developers,
just pointing out that they are seldom active users of what they write
and IMO this factor makes a huge difference, especially to usability and
GUI design.

I flew with XCSoar for a few years, but switched to LK8000 whe nit
appeared because I prefer its user interface, which took less effort to
set up the way I want it that XCSoar did, and on a good day with no
weather or airspace issues to force changes of plan I won't touch it from
launch to landing. I've looked at SYM but prefer LK8000.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

I can't agree with you enough on this point you make about software developers who actually use their product in real everyday life! This applies not only to soaring, but in almost every aspect of software development, especially when it comes to electronic medical record systems. (sorry, don't mean to derail the thread here, but this is a pet peeve of mine).

Maybe a bit off Topic. I have been using Tophat for a few years now. I started running it on a Nook Simple Touch. I loved the black and white sunlight readable display, but after a couple years the Nook seem to be getting slow. So I tried a Nexus 7. I liked the color display (hint turning the Terrain display off helps a lot) but it is not near as sunlight readable as the Nook was, but was good enough 95% of the time or better. Only when the sun was behind me would I occasionally get a glare on it that made it unreadable until I turned or shaded it with something. After a year or two I upgraded to a Nexus 2 - 2013 which had a slightly better display and was faster.

The other thing I really like about the Nexus is it is a totally self contained unit, It has it's own GPS so you can literally just carry it to the airplane and go fly. I had K6 Bluetooth adapter attached to my FLarm so with a bit of configuration it was receiving Flarm Data as well. I do sometimes connect external power to it, but the Nexus usually will last a 5 hour flight just fine.

Last year I put a S80 in my glider and added the Bluetooth module, It works pretty well but the bluetooth module is not quite as robust as the K6 module. The S80 bluetooths occasionally(almost Rarely) requirs a restart of the tablet or S80 to get it to link up, but once linked I never have any trouble during the flight.

A couple weeks ago flying the Region 8 contest about 9am I discovered my Nexus 7 touch screen had died, it would not respond to any touch commands. at 10:30 after the pilots meeting I went to the local Walmart and purchased a Samsung Tab 7 8gb for under $90. (they only had a display model available, normally $120). By the 1pm launch I had updated the software on the Tablet, installed Tophat, the Waypoint, airspace, and terrain files and had configured it to communicate with my S80 and had a working flight computer for the day. In summery I went from no flight computer other than the (S80 that I use for a backup) to my normal working flight computer in under about 2 hours and under a $100 investment. Try that when your dedicated flight computer dies, it may cost you more than that in just shipping and won't be a same day fix.

I am actually very pleased with the Samsung, The display is as good or even slightly better than the Nexus and it is faster. I wish it had a bit more memory than 8GB but does have a place for a MicroSD card if I need more space. I ran it with power connected, so not sure how the battery life is with it standalone, but It seems like it would be as good as the Nexus.

I think Tophat works very well, I only wish it did a bit better job a providing tactical Flarm traffic information. I don't use it for traffic avoidance but it would be nice if it kept track of Flarm traffic a bit better. Something like LK8000 or some other displays (Avionic) that show where traffic was or might be even though the signal is gone. With the right display it could even show Statistical climb information about the other gliders thermal and even mark a likely location to intercept the same thermal even after other glider has left the thermal. That way I don't have to be looking at the display as much or take near as long to trying and calculate information that computers are very good at doing.

To the original question, with nothing other than the minimum required changes Tophat, on the Nexus and Samsung, automatically switches between Thermalling and Cruise mode with and retains the zoom level for each screen, usually zoomed in for thermalling and zoomed out for cruise for me. I have never had issues with this no not sure why others seem to be having issues.

Brian

Brian,

Interesting stuff, especially about the color display and faster processor. I've noticed the Kobo is slower even than the Dell Streak 5 in some ways and I suspect that some of the uneven FLARM target performance I see is related to CPU and/or the ability to write to the display quickly enough. Sometimes a target will have the lift strength tagged, sometimes the competition ID, occasionally both, and sometimes just the target itself. It seems like switching off terrain and other features gives me better FLARM target depiction but it's difficult to be certain. This doesn't seem to be related to range, so I'm inclined to blame bandwidth (my PowerFLARM and Kobo are at 19,200--which I've tried to increase unsuccessfully) or video processing power.

Using XCSoar you can switch between displays by swiping left to right or
right to left.Â* Don't know if Top Hat retained that functionality.

Regarding Android devices for running these programs, I have found that
the Android operating system is clogged with a lot of bloatware that is
not needed for a device which is dedicated to soaring.Â* Do some research
and learn how to root the device and then flash a slimmed down operating
system.Â* My Nexus 7 2012 went from totally unusable (with XCSoar being
the only downloaded program) to blindingly fast when I flashed SlimKat
4.4 on it.Â* Now I can even run other aviation related apps and it's
still much faster than it ever was out of the box.

On 7/16/2018 3:13 PM, wrote:
Brian,

Interesting stuff, especially about the color display and faster processor. I've noticed the Kobo is slower even than the Dell Streak 5 in some ways and I suspect that some of the uneven FLARM target performance I see is related to CPU and/or the ability to write to the display quickly enough. Sometimes a target will have the lift strength tagged, sometimes the competition ID, occasionally both, and sometimes just the target itself. It seems like switching off terrain and other features gives me better FLARM target depiction but it's difficult to be certain. This doesn't seem to be related to range, so I'm inclined to blame bandwidth (my PowerFLARM and Kobo are at 19,200--which I've tried to increase unsuccessfully) or video processing power.

Regarding your last comment, I was able to achieve autoswitching from Cruise to Climb and back again with zoom levels retained for each, as you described. What I couldn't get is a way to quickly switch to the other screen/zoom level with one press of a button. On my system (v2.2.2b on a Kobo), the Switch button disappears when one of the pages is set to Auto but another poster said that wasn't the case with his system. TH is ported to different platforms in different versions so I'm wondering if that's a factor here.

Chip Bearden

--
Dan, 5J

On Monday, July 16, 2018 at 3:27:03 PM UTC-6, Dan Marotta wrote:
Using XCSoar you can switch between displays by swiping left to right or
right to left.Â* Don't know if Top Hat retained that functionality.

Software button with Top Hat. Very handy and not as clumsy (to me) as the swipe.

Mike

Software button with Top Hat. Very handy and not as clumsy (to me) as the swipe.

Mike

I agree - it is much more intuitive to swipe to Pan and to press the button to change info box screens. When I used XCSOAR I use to change screens by accident once in a while.

Top Hat is really well thought out and a good improvement to a great piece of software.

WH