SoCiS/2013/Ideas

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 2013 (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

Marble is a Virtual Globe based on Qt technology and is a part of the KDE Edu Suite (http://edu.kde.org). The Marble webpage is at http://edu.kde.org/marble and the developers' mailing list is at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel.

Project: Marble: Bringing Marble into the Planetarium

Brief explanation: Marble is a great educational tool for desktops and mobile devices. It has extensive support for projections. As such it could be easily used to provide the view in a format that can be used for single projector digital planetariums. This could be developed further into a solution that can be used with multiple projectors and multiple servers.

Expected results: Marble is used to display the starry sky, earth and planets inside a digital planetarium dome.

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!

Recommended Books: Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus - this book has been commonly regarded as the "bible" of celestial computations since the very first home computers were sold in the late 70ies.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org>, Rene Kuettner

Contact

• IRC channel: #marble on Freenode
• Mailinglist: [email protected] See http://kde.org/mailinglists/ for details
• Website: http://edu.kde.org/marble

Project: Displaying Solar / Lunar Eclipses in Marble

Brief explanation: This project is about displaying Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Marble. Gerhard Holtkamp has donated some code to the Marble Project to calculate the occurance and the appearance of eclipses. The goal of this project is to create a plugin for Marble that allows to provide a nice informative visualization of solar eclipses and lunar eclipses inside Marble.

Especially in combination with Marble's other features (OpenStreetMap, Climate charts, Real Time Cloud Cover in Marble, etc.) this provides a powerful tool for the casual user and astronomer as well as for the eclipsophile enthusiast who wants to plan a journey to a certain solar eclipse.

Expected results: Marble automatically informs the user about an upcoming eclipse that is soon to happen via a dialog, Visualization of eclipse paths (umbra / penumbra), User can search for eclipses and different eclipse types (partial/total lunar, partial/annular/total solar) inside Marble, Marble can visualize eclipses and prepare trips to a solar eclipse. Graphs are rendered onto Marble similar to the ones provided by Fred Espenak on the NASA Eclipse Website. Where possible links could be integrated that point to more information on each eclipse.

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

Recommended Books: Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus - this book has been commonly regarded as the "bible" of celestial computations since the very first home computers were sold in the late 70ies.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org> , Rene Kuettner

Contact

• IRC channel: #marble on Freenode
• Mailinglist: [email protected] See http://kde.org/mailinglists/ for details
• Website: http://edu.kde.org/marble

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> and/or Dennis Nienhüser <earthwings AT gentoo DOT org&gt

Contact

• IRC channel: #marble on Freenode
• Mailinglist: [email protected] See http://kde.org/mailinglists/ for details
• Website: http://edu.kde.org/marble