Scott’s Weblog

Navigation in Python

January 19th, 2006

In the process of developing the Rapid Deploy project, I found I needed to store location data (lat,long) and calculate distances and bearings between two points. Because Rapid Deploy was a 420 project, it became a horrible hack, but since then I’ve had time to separate it out into a module of it’s own. python-nav does two main things:

• Gives you a GeoPoint object to store location information in decimal or DMS format
• Calculates Great Circle Distances and uses spherical trig to calculate bearings between two points on a sphere (GeoPoints).

python-nav is useful if you’re doing things with GPS data. It’s pure-Python, so installation is a simple matter of “python setup.py install”. There’s documentation in the tarball as well as in the code itself.
Download python-nav.

Entry Filed under: General