A new home for the Total Open Station project

As announced in a previous blog post, the Total Open Station project has a new home! More specifically, we’re still on GitHub but I have moved the main repository from my personal GitHub account to the “totalopenstation” organization, with myself and @psolyca as owners. This seems like a simple step but, in fact, it is… Continua a leggere A new home for the Total Open Station project

Total Open Station 0.4 release

Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash

This article was originally published on the Total Open Station website at https://tops.iosa.it/ After two years of slow development, I took the opportunity of some days off to finally release version 0.4, that was already available in beta since 2017. No open bugs were left and this release is mature enough to hit the repositories.… Continua a leggere Total Open Station 0.4 release

Total Open Station: a specialised format converter

It’s 2017 and nine years ago I started writing a set of Python scripts that would become Total Open Station, a humble GPL-licensed tool to download and process data from total station devices. I started from scratch, using the Python standard library and pySerial as best as I could, to create a small but complete… Continua a leggere Total Open Station: a specialised format converter

Total Open Station packaged for OpenSUSE

Thanks to Angelos Tzotzos (Remote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens) Total Open Station has an installable package for OpenSUSE, since a few weeks. Installing is as easy as: $ sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_12.1/ GEO $ sudo zypper refresh $ sudo zypper install TotalOpenStation Any report about this package will be very welcome. We… Continua a leggere Total Open Station packaged for OpenSUSE

Total Station and GNU/Linux: Zeiss Elta R55 done!

The pySerial library is really good. Today I installed it and in half an hour I got acquainted with its class methods, even though I have little knowledge about serial ports and the like. With some trial and error about the connection parameters, I was even able to solve the problem with non-printable characters, tweaking… Continua a leggere Total Station and GNU/Linux: Zeiss Elta R55 done!

Total stations and GNU/Linux, part 2

In this off-line weekend, I went on investigating the output from the Zeiss Elta R55 total station. First of all, it turns out that the file was not binary. A simple $ file downloaded_data downloaded_data: Non-ISO extended-ASCII text could have revealed this simple truth. My error was due mainly to the fact that most of… Continua a leggere Total stations and GNU/Linux, part 2

cat /dev/total_station > file

This post is one of the “dear lazyweb” ones. Here at the department we have a Zeiss Elta R55 total station. This device has its own software for downloading recorded data, but, as usual, it’s a Windows-only, non-free application. Is it possible to download data from such a device using a GNU/Linux machine? Nobody knows.… Continua a leggere cat /dev/total_station > file