Welcome to the Cumulus Home Page
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N810 running Cumulus |
Cumulus is a flight navigation program, programmed in C++ and aimed at the soaring community. The first generation of Cumulus runs on Zaurus and iPaq hardware with a Linux OS under Qtopia respectively Opie by using Qt class library Release 2.x. With the disappearance of the old hardware platforms new alternatives must be searched.
Our current hardware platform are the Nokia Internet Tablets N800, N810 and N900 with Maemo OS2008/OS2009 by using Qt class library Release 4.x. They have a Linux based OS called Maemo and the installation of Cumulus is simply possible by using the program manager. There is no need to flash the OS or to do any other manipulations on it.
Another new hardware alternative was opened with Google's Android OS. There are a lot of devices on the market and Josua Dietze has made a first port of Cumulus to this new platform. See here for more information.
Cumulus provides a moving map display and all the information you need to easily navigate while requiring a minimum of user interaction. It uses a NMEA compatible Bluetooth GPS receiver (N800) or the internal GPS device (N810/N900) to provide it with information on the current position, altitude, heading and speed. Of course Cumulus supports flight tasks, waypoints and can calculate the distance and heading to your waypoint, arrival altitude, wind force and direction, sunrise and sunset times, etc. Take a look at our Screenshots page for a quick impression of what Cumulus can do.
The Cumulus packages come without any preinstalled maps. You can either download the Ground and Terrain data files you need from our Maproom but the same can Cumulus do, if there is an active Internet connection available.
Cumulus supports the OpenAir file format for the Airspaces but do not provide such files. Please search in the Internet for files of the region where you do fly. Addresses where you can find information are:
- Worldwide Soaring Turnpoint Exchange Airspace
- Airspace Data Germany published by the DAeC
Airfield and outlanding data are taken from the Welt2000 data base, created by Michael Meier.
Please have a look at the Online Help for more information how to get and install the map files inside Cumulus.
Family
Cumulus is a fork of the KFLog project, a program aimed at flight planning and flight analysis for gliders. Cumulus and KFLog are partners. Their functionality do overlap only very small. Both handle in conjuction waypoints and tasks. First KFLog can be used to plan a task to fly. Then you use Cumulus during your flight with its navigation and flight calculation features. Finally you take the logfiles you made with Cumulus from your PDA within KFLog and analyze your flight.