FPAssistant Suite SDK

Work has progressed this year on the SDK but not so much on adding new features but improving existing functionality in the areas of code along with hardware and OS support. Support to access the ICAO Data Service API using minimal code and returning data in objects was started. Detailed below we will release soon the option for .NET 8 support and an GitHub organisation page. Next feature to complete will be Aerodrome Surfaces. We also plan to have a basic version of the SDK that offers some of the functionality and API’s free.

GitHub and Apps

Microsoft has change the App store in 2023 and also the future of developing using UWP was put into question. The sample app we have developed and is in the store that many of you have downloaded is written using UWP. We decided not to put to much more effort into this so we recently announced an organisation in GitHub; click here. This is area where we have started to develop demo apps for FPAssistant SDK and we hope to have many repos giving people access to source code in using the SDK. The first repo created in an example Microsoft WinForms app that exposes and show some of the features in the SDK (IAS/TAS, Linear conversion, etc). This first repo has been names FPAssistantSampleAppWf .

Apple

Apple Silicon has progressed now to the M3 and is comes in 3 flavours…

Image Credits: Apple

This latest chip has 5 billon more transistors than the M2 and an incredible 9 billion more than the M1. These chips are now appearing through the Apple set of hardware devices.

Still no further news about an Apple car!!

Microsoft

Microsoft has followed Apple and have made announcements about their chips coming including one for AI processing. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have had new releases and .NET 8 has been released. We support .NET 8 and this can be seen in the GitHub sample WinForm app and also in the SDK but available upon request as the NuGet version targets .NET Standard 2.0 for maximum reached. If a customer needs a specific build for ARM or .NET version then these can be made available.

FPAssistant home page on GitHub

This can be found on GitHub by clicking here. To start with, the first example app is a Windows application that shows some of the API’s in action from the SDK. On each form in the example there is a link to show the relevant API documentation at the online site. The Windows application is targeting .NET 8.0 (at time of writing this blog) and uses the WinForm framework to host the app.

Demo app for FPAssistant SDK

In time we hope that the developer community will expand the use of the demo app but we do plan to extend the features ourselves showing other developers in using the SDK.

If you have any suggestions for further examples of how to do something then please do get in contact with us.

Here is an example of using the ICAO API Data service in two lines of C# code:

Example of calling the ICAO API Data Service using FPAssistant

The first line initiates the data service using the API KEY (obtained from ICAO) and then the second line simply does all the hard work of calling the web API to translate the data to return in a list of Airport Codes.

The data returned, where possible, will be presented in FPAssistant aviation objects. For example, in the case of the code above a .NET List<> of AirportCodesDoc7910 objects are returned and the geographical coordinates are available through the GeoCoordinateBasic data type in the FPAssistant SDK.

Details of AirportCodesDoc7910 object

Further information of this assisting API tool can be found by clicking here.

Further details of the ICAO API Data Service are available on the ICAO website where you can find details on getting started, looking at the examples provided by ICAO and more importantly how to get your API KEY to use the service; to get the API KEY you must register with ICAO.

Note: Currently not all of the dataset service available from the ICAO API Data Service are available in the FPAssistant SDK, if the one you require is missing then please do make contact and the Development Team here will add it in a short time frame.

There is also an in-built validation to the NOTAM struct that will warn the developer of any unexpected values with a comprehensive description of the failed validation check.

NOTAM Class

We are thinking of adding support for those developers who want to access the ICAO web API for NOTAM’s, if this is something you would like to do then please make contact.

Useful Links:

FPAssistant NOTAM API Documentation

NOTAM information – Wikipedia

Finnair Flight Training has been struggled for years to keep ground data up to date in Full Flight Simulators. It is critical, the airports, runways, navaids and approaches are realistic and corresponds to real world. This is especially important for runways with special approaches on challenging airports. Keeping data up to date is also a requirement in CS-FSTD and audited by Authorities annually.

Most of the simulators are not compatible with the ARINC 424 navigation data and it cannot be uploaded as it is to simulators. Finnair has total of 7 pcs. of Full Flight Simulators from different manufacturers with different technologies, data converters are not available. FPAssistant SDK with the great documentation and close co-operation with CADology finally brought us the solution to build in-house software, to compare and monitor the changes between ARINC 424 data cycles. Tool output highlights the key data which should be updated and engineers can perform the update manually focusing only to data which is relevant. This way we do not need to update full ARINC 424 data to simulators as regular basis.

If you have any questions or would like more information then please use the contact form on this website.

WGS84CrsIntersect – Computes the coordinates where two geodesic curves intersect

WGS84Destination – Computes destination point based on course and a static point

WGS84Distance – Distance between two points

WGS84PtIsOnGeodesic – Algorithm determines if a point lies on and within the bounds of a given
geodesic.

More formula from the FAA Doc 8260.58 will be added in due course.

.NET 6.0

.NET 6.0 support has been added to the FPAssistant SDK: This has been achieved by adding another project that targets .NET 6.0. It seems that .NET is progressing quickly with a year cadence for releases (.NET 7.0 is due later this year and is already available in Preview). We have dropped support for .NET 5.0.

Windows SDK Upgrade

The SDK will now target Windows SDK 10.0.19041.0 (from 10.0.18362), this is due to required support for Windows 11 and also that Visual Studio 2022 does not install the required runtimes for the C++ components (they have to installed manually).

Visual Studio 2022

The SDK is now developed using the latest release from Microsoft of Visual Studio which is 2022.

And if you have any questions then please do contact Dawson Bunn.

It is interesting to see the patterns showing the placements of the wind turbines offshore UK, the red dots in the image below.

The article is…

QGIS displaying UK obstacle data

For a while I’ve been looking at QGIS as a tool to display geographical data, it was other colleagues in the aviation world that pointed me in this direction. After having a play with QGIS I thought I need something to achieve so I came up with a plan to display the UK obstacle data. This does sound straight forward but I did have a few hurdles to jump before I got it working to a point that I was happy with.

I got the data from the NATS website which is in an XLS format which I needed to get into a form that I could read from an app I’ve been developing, so I decided to go for the old CSV format. Saving the XLS out to CSV created issues as some columns in the spreadsheet have new line characters to separate the data like in the case of the Latitude/Longitude coordinate. This was not a big hurdle but a pain as I had to do manipulations in the XLS before I saved to a CSV file.

Next I visited Microsoft Azure and created a SQL Azure database and added a table to hold the Geography data and a few further fields for other data. i.e. Obstacle Identification and Description. This was quick and I made good progress.

I knocked up a small piece of C# code to add a single row to my table include spatial LINESTRING geography field and this I can see the data using a SQL query in SQL Server Management Studio. Then using QGIS, I attached to the SQL Azure database and a few minutes later I can see the geographical line in QGIS…Bingo!!

I needed an app to add the type of data I wanted into the table in SQL Azure, so I created a Windows 10 WinForm app and started to program. A few days later and further small hurdles jumped I now have an app that allows me to add aviation based data into the database which can be viewed in QGIS. I have tried to allow for most possibilities like adding point obstacles as geography POINT datatype as well as LINESTRING drawing a circle. I can also add 3D surfaces but as LINESTRING’s or POLYGON’s which the difference that the forma is 3D and the latter being 2D.

The main hurdle was getting the correct authentication of a SQL Azure login and user details for the database as QGIS and SQL Azure did not see eye to eye to begin with.

The big release a while back was .NET 5.0 and it seems that Microsoft and the community are releasing .NET on a yearly cadence generally at the end of a calendar year. As I write this blog .NET 6.x is the current release and .NET 7.0 is due in about 6 months.

Microsoft has announced in March 2022 that .NET 5.0 will reach End of Support on May 8th 2022; see here for further details.

.NET is now available on many different hardware and software platforms, for example the image below is the download page for .NET showing .NET 6.0.2:

Example of .NET 6.0.3 Downloads

FPAssistant Binaries Options

We are happy to offer the FPAssistant Suite SDK on any of the .NET platforms but currently we do not build for each and every binary option; we offer 32-bit & 64-bit for both Intel and ARM processor, the .NET Standard 2.0.

But we are not sure weather to keep the binary options for .NET 5.x and 6.x when .NET 7.0 is released. Currently we are assuming that our customers who use .NET will be upgrading to keep up with the latest releases. If this is not the case then we would like to hear from you. The development team can always add a new project to the solution or if you are a customer that has access to the source code then you can do this yourself.

The issue for us come us when older .NET versions are removed from the latest Visual Studio hence we then need to keep installed older and previous versions to keep the binary offerings.

Also, we would like to hear from you regarding the delivery mechanism, is NuGet reasonable? At the moment we only have the binary for the .NET Standard 2.0; would you like to see the other .NET versions (5, 6 and 7) on NuGet as well?

The ARM goes marching on…

Copyright Apple Inc

Both Apple and Microsoft have been busy adding to their support for ARM based processors. Apple launched a new version of its M1 processor (Pro & Max)

and Microsoft added a lot more development support for ARM in the way of 64-bit and more interestingly for Apple Silicon.

From Microsoft…

• Windows 11 Released
• Visual Studio 2022 Released
• .NET 6.0 Released (with Apple silicon support!)
• Updated Duo phone

From Apple…

• Apple M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors, M1 Max 57 billion transistors, 10-Core, memory speed to 400GB/s, 32-core GPU
• New Macs based on the new Apple Silicon
• Updated watch

From CADology…

• CAD Geodesy Assistant – Developed for AutoCAD and BricsCAD; Further details here
• FPAssistant SDK – ICAO Temperature Correction calcs, Improved Coordinate Systems/Projection classes, GML Circle & ARC support, Implemented point on Geodesic (FAA), ICAO Aerodrome OLS, .NET 6.0 support, General SDK class improvements with documentation.

We are looking forward to see what will be achieved with ARM based computers next year, 2022 should be another really interesting year. Both Apple and Microsoft share prices have gained: Apple price is~$160 & Microsoft is ~$336  at 30-Nov-2021.