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SoCiS/2011/Ideas

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See also: SOCIS Instructions

Guidelines for ESA Summer of Code in Space

Information for Students

These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Being accepted as a ESA Summer of Code in Space 2011 (ESA SoCiS) student is quite competitive. Students are supposed to thoroughly research the technologies of their proposed project. Also they are supposed to be in contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!

If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the KDE EDU list [email protected] or on the general KDE development list [email protected]. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.

Adding a Proposal

Note

Follow the template of other proposals!


Project:

Brief explanation:

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

  • if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives
  • a brief explanation
  • the expected results
  • pre-requisites for working on your project
  • if applicable, links to more information or discussions
  • mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module
  • your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)

If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Ideas

How to find ideas? Obvious sources of projects are the bugs database, the forum, and your list and IRC channel ideas.

Marble Virtual Globe

Project: Marble: Display Satellite orbits in Marble

Brief explanation: Marble has a dedicated framework for displaying geospatial data. Our plugin framework allows to visualize data from various topics (e.g. earthquakes, wikipedia articles etc.). It would be great if Marble would display satellite positions (current ones and past) on their orbit. This could either be done via a plugin that uses the ready-made positions and data from web services or by calculating the positions from the orbital elements locally.

Expected results: Satellite positions in Marble get displayed. Orbit is displayed. For some probes (like ISS or Hubble Space Telescope) a dedicated icon is shown. Tooltip over the satellite has information about local set and rise times.

Knowledge Prerequisite: A good grasp over C++ and object-oriented programming, and Qt; writing test cases with Qt; should quickly learn how to write libraries; have a lot of patience; ability to solve software design problems.

Math skills are needed, familiarity with celestial mechanics is a plus!

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <[email protected]>

Contact

Project: Panoramic picture support for celestial bodies in Marble

Brief explanation: Projects like the Mars Exploration Rovers or the moon landings have produced stunning Panoramic images:

Mars (MER): http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/panoramas/

Titan (Huygens): http://www.beugungsbild.de/huygens/huygens.html

Moon (Apollo): http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollopanoramas/

Venus (Venera): http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

At least some of them are available in the public domain. Marble has support for visualizing other planets (like Mars and Venus) already. It would be great if Marble would e.g. display icons on top of the Mars Globe which the user could use to visualize the panoramic photos in a panoramic view. The data would get retrieved in the background automatically from files.kde.org. The visualization of the Panoramic view would be done through the Marble library's feature-set itself: There is some initial code for using the Gnomonic projection in Marble here: https://github.com/shentok/marble/tree/gnomonic ).

Expected results: The user can visualize Panoramic photos from past space missions in Marble as a panoramic view (e.g. Apollo Missions, MER, Viking, etc.).

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++. Familiarity with Qt will help.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org>

Contact

Project: Extending Marble's Stars plugin

Brief explanation: Since a few years Marble has a very basic stars plugin that accurately shows the brightest stars. It would be great if this could be extended so that it provides more advanced visualization (constellation lines, Dec/Rect grid, planets, deep sky objects, labels, etc.). So in the end some advanced feature set would be implemented that would be a bit closer to Stellarium, KStars or Google Sky.

Expected results: Improved Stars Plugin that has a more sophisticated sky visualization - including planets, labels, deek sky objects, dec/rect coordinate grid, etc.).

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++. Familiarity with Qt will help.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org>

Contact

Project: Marble - Natural Earth Vector Map

Brief explanation: The current "Atlas map" which is targeted at education is based on the MWDB2 dataset. The data is pretty old and the whole implementation that covers the Atlas map still has a few traces of "historic" code. There's a new proposal that would introduce the high quality Natural Earth data. This would require several changes to the Marble code and its data. See

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Marble/NaturalEarth

Expected results: A fully optimized rendering of the Natural Earth map as vector rendering by using and extending Marble's existing classes.

Knowledge Prerequisite: A good grasp over C++ and object-oriented programming, and Qt; writing test cases with Qt; should quickly learn how to write libraries; have a lot of patience; ability to solve software design problems

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <[email protected]>

Contact

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