RELEASE: Caveatron Process 2.5.0

[caveatron-discuss]

Caveatron Process 2.5.0 for Windows and MacOS is now available on Github:

https://github.com/Caveatron/Software/tree/main/PC%20Applications

This release has a number of fixes especially to two major problems recently identified by users on this forum related to setting reference station coordinates and updating point cloud coordinates. Additionally, a new function has been added to allow creation of a survey file from a Caveatron log file, and support is added for an upcoming minor revision to the CVL file format.

Changes:

• Fixed an issue that prevented setting the reference station coordinates in the Survey Review Window when using large numbers (such as most UTM coordinates.)
• To deal with getting sufficient precision when using such large numbers, all point coordinates and normals now saved when processed use 3 significant digits instead of the previous 6. Anything more than 3 significant digits (equivalent to 1 mm) is meaningless anyway given the precision of the hardware, so this will also make the processed scan files smaller.
  
• Opening an .SRV survey files with a #FIX line now sets that station to the reference station automatically including populating the reference station coordinates with the #FIX coordinate values (they can be changed in they Survey Review Window as before). If no #FIX station exists, the first station is selected.
  
• Opening a .LST or .XYZ station file selects a station with coordinates of 0 as the reference station (can be changed in the Survey Review Window as before). If no station has 0 coordinates, the first station is selected.
  
• Fixed the Update Point Cloud Coordinates menu function which was not working properly.
• Improved the Update Point Cloud Coordinates function operation and added a checkbox option to not overwrite existing scans and instead create them as new files with "_Convert" appended to the existing scan file name.
  
• Added a new menu item to create a new Survey file (SRV) from a Caveatron Log file (LOG) using new IMU values. This is useful if you realized after surveying a cave that you did not have a good calibration. Now all you have to do is recalibrate the Caveatron and use that calibration and the Log file with this menu function to create a corrected survey. The Log file has always stored a single set of raw accelerometer and magnetometer readings for each shot (along with the station names and distance) but this data has been hard to use before now. The new survey file is not quite the same as the original since there is no averaging of multiple measurements and there are a few other limitations as noted in the manual but it provides a new option if problems occurred.
  
• Reorganized the File menu
• Added support for the upcoming CVL file format version 3.1. This new minor revision adds new lines to the start of each scan to save the initial accelerometer and magnetometer measurements. This fully separates the post-processing from the Caveatron's onboard calibration at the time of the scan. What that means is that if you had a bad calibration when taking scans you can get a good calibration afterwards and use that to fully process the scan data.
  
• Updated the user manual

[caveatron-discuss]

A couple of additional comments about the new release:

• When I referred to 3 significant digits above I meant 3 decimal places. However many significant digits needed to get the full coordinate are used that retains 1 mm of precision.
  
• Occasionally when opening a single scan to review, the rotations would appear to be there but NaN appeared across all processed values and no points were shown. This was a problem with corrupted values in the first rotation which, if detected are now ignored so that the scan processes correctly.
  
• I plan to release a Linux version of the update but this will take a little more time to get done.