Visualization Makes Data in to Pretty Pictures

Things may look like they're progressing slowly, but looks can be deceiving.

Take large datasets for example. Wall of numbers like this is an awesome thing for a computer, not so much for a human:

And this is just the navigational data from a quick flight in FlightGear with the RC2USB module, someday to be piped in to an autopilot.  Forget about the amount of attitude data used to keep the planed levelled.

To better "see" what's going on, we plot the data in to google earth:

With the code prom the previous project, we can see where and when, but not exactly what is going on. We can do better.

With some work, we can get a nice "heat map" of speed.

And once we know how to do that, we can visualize altitude. Can you guess what was the highest point of the flight?

Mix it all together, and we get a lot more information from the same image. Now, when we can "see better", we're ready to tackle on the autopilot.

P.S. Want to make pretty pictures like this? Start reading: https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/