[GH85Carrera]

Computers are so much fun!


We flew a project on Saturday and as usual I wanted to get on it right away. This one has real ground control points from a surveyor, and will be used for volume calculations. The surveyour sent over a ASCII test file right from his survey equipment. The file shows a target number, the coordinates in Y,X,Z. Easy peazy to import, usually. This time everything I tried the program said it had an error, and just made a pretty chime noise as the error.

I cussed a lot, and got my business partner's help. He knows lots of cuss words. He pulled up the flight we did for the client last year of the same site. Looked at that text file and the format looked the same. Still the error when trying to import it. I was about ready to just manually punch in the numbers from the file, but that has the risk of keyboard error, and is a stupid solution in the digital era.

Anyway, we finally imported it into Excel, and exported it as a text file. Evidently there were some carriage returns at the end of the file that are invisible. So we learned to be sure the data file is ONLY the number we need, and not one space or carriage return extra.