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Total Station Utilities

Introduction

This program and sub-programs outlined in the following pages has been written to provide a useful tool in the downloading of the OMNI Total Station Instrument and the Lietz Electronic Field Book (SDR-22). Included in the program is a utility to load a previously downloaded file from the SDR back into the SDR. Feature codes used by the SDR may also be loaded from a disk file into the SDR. Utilities include plotting, printing and editing of files. File formatting utilities are provided for CadServe Retriever, Design Plus, LI Contour and the Hydro-Yardage Program. Many of the routines from the previous version were updated and included in this version.

With the use of the utilities available in this program and using commercial software, a method has been developed to download the survey data, from the total station instrument, to disk, manipulate the data with programs in the computer up to including the design of a particular site using the HYDRO-YARDAGE program, without ever doing tedious hand work, such as manually measuring pond areas and entering cross-section data for earthwork quantities. This is the result of using the original downloaded file and formatting this file for other utility and commercial programs. This is a step towards in making full use of the computer do all of the work in the design of conservation practices.

The user's manual is set up in sections relating to the option selected from the main menu. Each section, as it discusses the option, displays in the manual what will be displayed on the screen as the program is run.

Equipment

The program has been written to operate in the MS-DOS environment. The program has been run on the AT&T 6300, 6386 and the Zenith Laptop computers. A hard disk with a minimum of 1.4 meg of free disk space is required. Graphics capability is required to run certain portions of the program. A math co-processor is recommended. The program was completely rewritten in Microsoft Basic Professional Development System 7 to access the functions of this language. Certain parts of the program may make the use of a Mouse if installed. The Kurta IS/ONE can be used for the mouse functions.

Key Functions

This program has been written to be as 'friendly' as possible. When a request for an answer is either '(y/n)' the program will accept either upper of lower case characters. The program makes use of function keys for 'help' and user input with the use of pop-up windows displayed on the screen.

Errors

Many error conditions have been trapped within the program. Various messages will appear in order for the user to rectify errors prior to proceeding with the remaining parts of the program. A great deal of effort has been made to get the so called 'bugs' out of the program, but unforeseen and uncommon data entries or attempting to make the program do what it was not intended to do, may still create these 'bugs'.

Saved Data

Data that is downloaded from the Total Station Instruments may be stored on disks located in either A: or B: drive. An exception to this is when the data is formatted for other software, in an ASCII format, the user may select a drive and directory to store the data.

Programs

The TOTAL STATION UTILITIES program makes use of eight programs. The following is a brief description of each.

  1. TOTALMEN.exe this program contains the menu, downloading utilities, printing utilities and formatting utilities.
  2. DXFLIC.exe this program converts DXF files created by LI Contour into a BME contour file that may be used with other portions of the program or loaded into Design Plus. The BME file created is of the same format as created by CadServe Retriever software.
  3. ENTRYOP2.exe this program contains the utilities for loading previously downloaded files that reside on disk back into the SDR Electronic Field Book. Included are utilities for creating, editing and loading FEATURE code files into the SDR.
  4. FILEDEL1.exe this utility program provides an easy method for deleting unwanted files from a disk.
  5. NEWCON22.exe this utility program requires graphics capability and loads BME (contour) files from disk and computes elevation-area tables while displaying the contours on the screen. The user may change the centerline location and the program will recompute the elevation-area table. The data that is created may be sent directly to the HYDRO-YARDAGE (small structure routing) program for use.
  6. SETUPTOT.exe this utility program provides a method of creating default files that are used in a site specific office. This option is required by the user at the designated office to make full use of the program and subprograms. This sub-program needs to be run only once at a specific office.
  7. TOTMOD2.exe this program contains the editing portion, for the editing of OMNI (random access) formatted files.
  8. TOTPLOT5.exe this program allows the user to plot OMNI (random access) file data of the Houston Instruments DMP-41 and DMP-61 plotters.

The file named BRT70EFR.EXE is a run time module supplied by MicroSoft, and the file named UITBEFR.LIB is a library of function calls for the programs.

Program support:
Norman Friedrich
Civil Engineer
120 N Industrial Prkwy #4
West Union, Iowa 52175

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