ANavS® Solution-Decoder Tool

The ANavS® Solution-Decoder Tool brings the binary solution output file into manageable file formats. The purpose of this tool is mainly for postprocessing. It can transform the .bin/.txt-file into .csv-format (Comma-Separated Values) for quick value visualization and .kml-format for coordinate visualization in Google-Earth.

Download:

Some Hints:

• The Source code has only been compiled for Windows systems (MinGW-Windows) and Linux systems (GNU-Linux)
• The path shall not contain any space characters or blank spaces
• If the Path is detected to be incorrect, it is safer to close the console and restart because problems tend to arise when trying to correct the path.
• The column header contains the same names as the first 49 variables of the proprietary binary protocol. The protocol is described in the article ANavS® Binary Solution Output Format.
• The decoder tool decodes the ANavS-Solution file commonly known as “PAD_solution.bin” or “PAD_solution.txt”. However, the solution file can have another name, as long as it does not contain any blank spaces.
• The delimiter of the .csv files is a semicolon “;”
  • The decoder file can be put in the same folder as the file which is desired to be decoded. If that is done, the path to the file can be the file name itself. However, it is always safer to use a complete path than a relative path.
  • e.g.: “PAD_solution.bin” instead of “C:\Users\ANavS\Documents\Test\PAD_solution.bin”

Hints for Linux Users

• In order to use the decoder, please open the bash and change your directory to the path where you saved the decoder file
• Then enter: “./ubxproject”
  • If the program says that you don’t have any access permissions, it probably means that you must change the permission flags/bits of the decoder file
    • Simply enter in the bash: “chmod +x ubxproject”
    • This will give your user the right to access the file which can be seen by the changed flags from “-rw-rw-r–” to à “-rwxrwxr-x”
    • Try it again.

Decode to .csv-format

The .csv-format is a way to visualize the ANavS solution in an editor or any spreadsheet-program such as Excel and LibreOffice.

1. Please open the “ubxprojext.exe” executable.
2. A console window will open, which asks for the path to the desired document. Please introduce the correct path to the ANavS solution-file.
3. If a correct path was introduced, the console will ask which format you wish to receive. You shall enter 0 for a .csv-format.
4. The console will ask a second time for a format. However, this time it is referring to to the format of the .csv-file. There are two formats to choose from basic and complete.
   1. 1. The basic format decodes all the important measurements such as time, position, velocity and acceleration, in a very compact form.
      2. The complete format includes a few more values than the basic one. However, these extra values are mostly valuable for development purposes and do not represent any added value for the customer. In addition, it requires more space. Until now the complete format includes the satellite information of each satellite recorded. Therefore, the console will first ask you which satellite systems you want to consider in the decoding process.
5. For practicality it is advised to use the basic format. Therefore enter 0.
6. If all values were entered correctly, the tool should begin the decoding process immediately. Thereupon the console visualizes the progress of the decoding process.
7. The resulting .csv-file “PADSolution.csv” will appear in the same folder as the “ubxprojext.exe”.
8. After the decoding process you can open the .csv-file in any spreadsheet-program to see the ANavS® Solution-output.

Decode to .kml-format

The .kml-format helps to visualize the recorded trajectory with services such as Google Earth or Google Maps. Since the regular data output-rate is quite high, it would make the .kml-file too memory-intensive. As a result, .kml-file only includes the most significant portion of the original data points, that means only GNSS-epochs are visualized.

1. Please open the “ubxprojext.exe” executable.
2. A console window will open, which asks for the path to the desired document. Please introduce the correct path to the ANavS solution file.
3. If a correct path was introduced, the console will ask which format you wish to receive. You shall enter 1 for a .kml-format.
4. If all values were entered correctly, the tool should begin the decoding process immediately. Thereupon the console visualizes the progress of the decoding process.
5. The resulting .kml-file “PADSolution.kml” will appear in the same folder as the “ubxprojext.exe”.
6. After decoding you can use that kml-file to visualize your recorded trajectory, e.g. by incorporating it to Google Earth.

Figure 1: Example kml-file where each purple dot is showing the most interesting states like position, velocity, accelleration and attitude