What is Altitude Analysis?

Altitude Analysis is a piece of Palm software for reading data from a LoLo or Alti2 or RAM3 or Altimax altimeter, to plot the data on field, and store it for later upload to a PC. It is a giftware program written by Petri Kuikka and Tapio Linkosalo, using NS Basic development environment.

We originally found LoLo as a nice piece of equipment to analyse the performance of our Free Flight model airplanes, to both measure launch height and sinking speed. However, bringing a laptop to the flying field is often a drag, but as we already use Palm handhelds to program the electronic timers in our models, we thought it would be nice to use the unit to visualise the data. Since then a number of other loggers have come to market, and while trying to find the best device for our use (free flight), we have added a few to work with "AA".

Altitude Analysis plotting picture
Altitude Analysis plotting screen.

Our software reads data from a altimeter, and stores it into programs own database. This data can later be send to PC, in precisely the same format as it came from the altimeter, so that any PC software dealing with altimeter data can be still used on the PC. While at field, you can recall any dataset stored into the Palm, plot it, zoom it, find the measured altitude at any point of the flight, and even calculate estimates of the climb or sinking speed.

The software is Giftware. This means that we (the authors) do not charge you money for downloading or using the software. It took us some time to write it, though, as well as we had to buy the development environment at our own cost. Therefore, if you find this software useful, we would appreciate that you say so, and even donate some sum of money to compensate for our expenses. We will also give out the source code of the software by request, so you may try some modifications if you like (you can download a demo version of NS Basic development environment, working for 30 days for free, at the NS Basic web site). We would be interested in seeing your modifications, and if we think that they are of wider interest, would like to include them in later versions of Altitude Analysis.

News

21 November 2010 (New release 2.6.0 available!)
Finally some new feature to Altitude Analysis: 'Temperature correction' for LoLo1, Alti2, RAM2 and RAM3 loggers:

  • You can set the temperature in which the logging was done to correct the plotting graphs.
  • When "saving" the data, the temperature value is also saved with the logged data. Note that you can also set and save the temperature value for old datasets in your Palms database.

    Release includes also couple of other minor fixes.
    - Petri

    3 October 2010 (New release 2.5.1 available!)
    I had personally almost 1 year long break in using altitude loggers, so not much has been happening. But now that I started using them again I & Tapio found several bugs in the last released 2.5.0 version. Following are now fixed for this new version:

  • Fixed sinking speed calculation to work correctly, when clicking screen in the plotting screen.
  • Fixed RAM2/3 datasets parsing missing second dataset if 8180 limit was reached when loading a saved data.
  • Fixed RAM2/3 'Send to PC' feature to work correctly with datasets stored with "Save selection as..." functionality.

    In addition I increased the internal data table size to 8185. This is needed for the upcoming temperature correction feature. But this change is bit risky, as it is very much on the limit of NS Basic table size (with 8186 it crashes almost on all Palms). If you start seeing problems (crashes mainly) with the new 2.5.1 version, that you did not notice with older versions, let us know ASAP. We can then quickly verify if it is really caused by the table size increase or something else.
    - Petri

    17 July 2008 (New release 2.5.0 available!)
    Tapio has been pushing heavily two new features to AA for a while: drifting correction and possibility to read altimeter data that is above the 8180 limit of Altitude Analysis. So now we finally have them here. See the history page for more information, or just download and try it out.
    - Petri

    31 March 2008 (New release 2.3.4 available!)
    Adds preliminary RAM3 support and fixes possible communication problems with Palm T|X and Palm Tungsten T5.
    - Petri

    3 March 2008 (New release 2.3.2 available!)
    Fixes RAM2 'Send to PC' functionality to work properly.
    - Petri

    7 July 2007 (New release 2.3.1 available!)
    Minor fixes to Altimax configuration and now the plotting screen supports 0.1 seconds accuracy, so F1C guys can better estimate the climbing speeds.
    - Petri

    13 March 2007 (New release 2.3.0 available!)
    Lot of changes for the Altimax users. New Altimax variable sampling rate support is now fully implemented and it is pretty cool. See history page for all the changes.
    - Petri

    10 December 2006 (New release 2.2.0 available!)
    Few bigger changes done to the software:
    * Added support for new Altimax firmware version with headers. This will later add a new variable sampling rate support to Altimax allowing longer flights to be recorded. It will work so that first 20 seconds are stored with 5 samples per second and after that you will have 3 sampling rate options to use: fast (5/sec), medium (2/sec) and slow (1/sec). Slowest option will allow over 17 minute flights to be recorded.
    * F1A mode 0 point is now at the release point instead of beginning of the data
    * Includes a prototype of flight estimation data view. This is accessible throught the plotting window menu, and it calculates an estimate for every 30 seconds for the currently zoomed view.

    In addition to these software is now compiled with NS Basic 6 and there are newer runtime libraries available that fix some issues. So please download and install them too.
    - Petri

    24 September 2006 (New release 2.1.1 available!)
    Tapio fixed some Altimax issues and made the flight time estimation dialog a bit clearer.
    - Petri

    13 July 2006
    I added the LoLo Analysis database converter utility to downloads section. With it you can move your old LoLo Analysis data to be used with Altitude Analysis. I also updated the manual and screenshots section with Altitude Analysis screenshots.
    - Petri

    9 July 2006
    Finally the first real release 2.1.0 is available! New features include:
    * Full support for 4 loggers: LoLo, ALti2, RAM2 and Altimax
    * Height clicking now counts the estimated flight times
    * Logger type is automatically detected from saved data
    * Altimax download size can now be configured in options screen
    * Altimax can be configured and its memory can be cleared
    - Petri

    12 March 2006
    A new Altitude Analysis is being built from old LoLo Analysis software. New features include
    * Support for RAM2
    * Support for Altimax
    * Support for Altimax configuration
    - Petri

    Older news can be read here.