Alright,
If any of you have followed or seen GPS Drift, an excel spreadsheet that helps you predict the landing location of your model and high power rockets. I wrote it back in 2021.
@MarsLander recently reached out about a weathercock addition to the sheet.
This was added and released - Thanks again @MarsLander for this implementation and idea!
Still I wasn't satisfied. I have never actually used the program to aid in launching rockets. It's just too clunky.
Manual inputs for the wind profiles dependent on a forecast website, usually Windy.com. Also dependent on another website to help create the kml files for viewing in Google Earth.
@Buckeye and I were discussing other options for getting forecast data easier in the original thread.
He mentioned possibly using the data file that a website called Winds Aloft provides.
Winds Aloft uses the NOAA Rucsounding model to generate the winds forecast, which goes up to 100,000 feet(It may go higher, but Mark's data is only available to 100K feet)
I reached out to Mark Schulze, the website owner to get a little more information and see if he could answer some questions. He is very enthusiastic and helpful, and told me that I can use an API call to get the data right off his website.
This was a game-changer. No more manual data entry for forecasts!
I set off working on the sheet/code. The project ballooned into a large VBA project, where most of the guts is VBA code instead of spreadsheet calculations in cells.
Admittedly, I used a lot of ChatGPT for some of the trickier elements. I'm blown away at how easy it is to get working code based on a few sentences describing your need.
I spent quite a bit of time arguing with ChatGPT as well
The beta version had multiple forecast files that the user would have to combine using the website GPS Visualizer. It worked ok, but still clunky.
I still wasn't satisfied. I really wanted to nix the dependency on GPS Visualizer. It's a great site, but I wanted to be able to write native KML files write out of Excel.
So that's what I did, with more help from ChatGPT. Ha!
Thus GPS DriftCast was born.
With just the inputs in green, we can generate up to 12 hours of forecast data, Only 6 shown in the example here for clarity.
The first output, which is actually prompted by the program for the user to open immediately after running is the Landing Scatter plot.
Pretty self-explanatory. Shows the potential landing points for for the wind forecasts grabbed off Winds Aloft.
The other output is the Flight Scatter plot, which shows the "flight" of the rocket and possible drift profile. This is a separate file. that is saved in the same location as the landing plot.
The file location is provided by the user. Second picture below. This one is not utilizing the weathercock feature.
This flight scatter is showing the weathercock feature. You can see the different apogee points due to the various wind profiles.
There's some other helpful information provided as well.
The At a Glance section shows the launch time, landing points and average surface winds up to a fraction of the apogee. These may need to be tamed down a bit. Also shown is the distance between the landing point and launch point.
The weathercock setting remains. However, to account for the changing forecast and unknown wind direction/speed, a table is employed.
The user will run 5 Rocksim/Open Rocket sims for the wind speeds given The result of the up range/wind distance will be put into the table.
The algorithm interpolates this table to get the weathercock distance from a calculated wind direction.
The main idea here is to be able to get a general idea of where your rocket may land. Sometimes the winds aloft are different than the ground level and will push your rocket in a direction you aren't anticipating.
Knowing the general location it could have landed will hopefully aid in recovery efforts coupled with radio tracking/GPS tracking. If it proves really valid, you may decide to not fly a rocket because it may end up landing in some trees or something of that nature.
The other use case is giving an idea of the landing location if a dual deploy rocket has a main at apogee event.
A general disclaimer, I make no claim that this is perfect, or even correct at this point. I have not been able to validate the results. I am hoping to give it a try this summer. I hope many of you will too! Please let me know any feedback you have!
I think that's about it.
Let me know your thoughts! Looking forward to seeing some people use and report back results!
Dave
If any of you have followed or seen GPS Drift, an excel spreadsheet that helps you predict the landing location of your model and high power rockets. I wrote it back in 2021.
@MarsLander recently reached out about a weathercock addition to the sheet.
This was added and released - Thanks again @MarsLander for this implementation and idea!
Still I wasn't satisfied. I have never actually used the program to aid in launching rockets. It's just too clunky.
Manual inputs for the wind profiles dependent on a forecast website, usually Windy.com. Also dependent on another website to help create the kml files for viewing in Google Earth.
@Buckeye and I were discussing other options for getting forecast data easier in the original thread.
He mentioned possibly using the data file that a website called Winds Aloft provides.
Winds Aloft uses the NOAA Rucsounding model to generate the winds forecast, which goes up to 100,000 feet(It may go higher, but Mark's data is only available to 100K feet)
I reached out to Mark Schulze, the website owner to get a little more information and see if he could answer some questions. He is very enthusiastic and helpful, and told me that I can use an API call to get the data right off his website.
This was a game-changer. No more manual data entry for forecasts!
I set off working on the sheet/code. The project ballooned into a large VBA project, where most of the guts is VBA code instead of spreadsheet calculations in cells.
Admittedly, I used a lot of ChatGPT for some of the trickier elements. I'm blown away at how easy it is to get working code based on a few sentences describing your need.
I spent quite a bit of time arguing with ChatGPT as well
The beta version had multiple forecast files that the user would have to combine using the website GPS Visualizer. It worked ok, but still clunky.
I still wasn't satisfied. I really wanted to nix the dependency on GPS Visualizer. It's a great site, but I wanted to be able to write native KML files write out of Excel.
So that's what I did, with more help from ChatGPT. Ha!
Thus GPS DriftCast was born.
With just the inputs in green, we can generate up to 12 hours of forecast data, Only 6 shown in the example here for clarity.
The first output, which is actually prompted by the program for the user to open immediately after running is the Landing Scatter plot.
Pretty self-explanatory. Shows the potential landing points for for the wind forecasts grabbed off Winds Aloft.
The other output is the Flight Scatter plot, which shows the "flight" of the rocket and possible drift profile. This is a separate file. that is saved in the same location as the landing plot.
The file location is provided by the user. Second picture below. This one is not utilizing the weathercock feature.
This flight scatter is showing the weathercock feature. You can see the different apogee points due to the various wind profiles.
There's some other helpful information provided as well.
The At a Glance section shows the launch time, landing points and average surface winds up to a fraction of the apogee. These may need to be tamed down a bit. Also shown is the distance between the landing point and launch point.
The weathercock setting remains. However, to account for the changing forecast and unknown wind direction/speed, a table is employed.
The user will run 5 Rocksim/Open Rocket sims for the wind speeds given The result of the up range/wind distance will be put into the table.
The algorithm interpolates this table to get the weathercock distance from a calculated wind direction.
The main idea here is to be able to get a general idea of where your rocket may land. Sometimes the winds aloft are different than the ground level and will push your rocket in a direction you aren't anticipating.
Knowing the general location it could have landed will hopefully aid in recovery efforts coupled with radio tracking/GPS tracking. If it proves really valid, you may decide to not fly a rocket because it may end up landing in some trees or something of that nature.
The other use case is giving an idea of the landing location if a dual deploy rocket has a main at apogee event.
A general disclaimer, I make no claim that this is perfect, or even correct at this point. I have not been able to validate the results. I am hoping to give it a try this summer. I hope many of you will too! Please let me know any feedback you have!
I think that's about it.
Let me know your thoughts! Looking forward to seeing some people use and report back results!
Dave
