CUSF Standalone Predictor - Version 2

Working on improving the Cambridge University Spaceflight landing predictor, a web-based tool for predicting the flight path and landing location of latex balloons.

Install

The source for the predictor itself is in pred_src/ and instructions for building it can be found there.

The predict/preds/ and gfs/ directories need to have rwx access by the PHP interpreter and the predict.py python script. You will need to install the following python packages: pydap, numpy, json, simple-json. We use at to automatically background the predictor, so you will need that installed.

Other than that, just clone this repo to a non web-accessible folder and create symlinks to the predict/ and hourly-predictions/ directories in the repo.

There are useful configuration options in predict/includes/config.inc.php.

Information

A cronjob should be run to delete directories in the preds/ directory after a given number of days, probably 7. Predictions older than 7 days are useless anyway.

The directory names are UUIDs comprised of an SHA1 hash of the launch parameters, and re-running predictions will overwrite data in the existing directory, rather than create a new one.

Credits & Acknowledgments

Credit as detailed in individual files, but notably:

• Rich Wareham - The new predictor and the hourly predictor system
• Fergus Noble, Ed Moore and many others

Jon Sowman 2010
http://www.hexoc.com
jon@hexoc.com