LiDAR point cloud to grid surface tutorial

[weiji14]

Tutorial showcasing LiDAR data processing pipeline over Wellington, New Zealand. Doing data loading using laspy, pre-processing with blockmedian, gridding with surface, and plotting in 2D with grdimage and in 3D using grdview.

If anyone wants to test this locally, clone this branch and run jupyter-book build book/

Note: I'll clear the Jupyter Notebook outputs and remove the *.py file (created using Jupytext) before merging this PR. Those files are just there to make it easier to review.

[leouieda]

Hey @weiji14 this looks really good! One minor comment: I would avoid type annotations in the tutorial code. Most users won't have seen this before and it can be a bit confusing. Particularly for data analysis code like this, they don't add much since we won't be running any sort of static analysis tool.

[leouieda]

Actually, now that I think about it some more, if you're talking through it and explaining then it should be totally fine.

[weiji14]

Hmm, I probably won't be typing out the type-hints in the live coding recording. But I find it useful to have it in the rendered version so people know what the variables are. Will have a bit of a think about it.

[leouieda]

How about putting the variable at the end of the cell so they get the preview (which includes what they are)? Type hints are still very new and most novice/intermediate Python programmers won't have seen them before.

[weiji14]

Yep, printing out the variable sounds good.

[weiji14]

First shot at a video recording! It's 27min30s which is a bit too long, so I might need to talk a bit faster or cut out some stuff to bring it down to 20min. Also not sure why Zoom recorded two windows of myself 😅

video1371165121.mp4

If anyone has any feedback, let me know before l do a second (and hopefully final) recording tomorrow.

[leouieda]

@weiji14 just watched the video and it looks great! I really the style of your notebook 🙂 A few notes in case you want to give this another go:

1. Put your browser in full screen mode and zoom in on the page to about 130-150%. This makes it easier to read on smaller screens like phones or when people have the video next to the notebook (which is what we want them to do).
2. The double video is from Zoom automatically inserting the video of the presenter. On the screenshare, you also get a little preview for yourself (which is the smaller image you have there). To avoid having double, move the preview to another or minimize it.
3. If you want more control over what is recorded and where things are placed on the screen, OBS is an awesome tool for that. It takes a bit of learning to get started but definitely worth the investment if you have some time (which is probably not the case right now).

[leouieda]

Also, I thought your pacing was very good and easy to follow along. If you want to talk a bit faster you could but it also wouldn’t hurt to leave 1 or 2 things out as extra reading to save a few minutes.

[weiji14]

Thanks @leouieda for the great tips! I've started using OBS (just watched a few quick youtube videos to get up to speed) and am definitely hooked 😃

• Put your browser in full screen mode and zoom in on the page to about 130-150%. This makes it easier to read on smaller screens like phones or when people have the video next to the notebook (which is what we want them to do).

Good point. I also discovered that Jupyterlab has a View -> Presentation Mode setting which bumps up the font sizes a bit more.

Also, I thought your pacing was very good and easy to follow along. If you want to talk a bit faster you could but it also wouldn’t hurt to leave 1 or 2 things out as extra reading to save a few minutes.

I've got a second recording which is 25min, a bit shorter but not quite under 20min yet. Will leave it at that for now and see how long Max and Andre's recording is before deciding whether to re-record again.

lidar_to_surface.mp4

[leouieda]

I also discovered that Jupyterlab has a View -> Presentation Mode setting which bumps up the font sizes a bit more.

Oh I didn't know that one. Will definitely use it next time I teach/record!

I've got a second recording which is 25min, a bit shorter but not quite under 20min yet.

This looks really good, @weiji14! If you need to cut it down to 20 min, I would move the 3D section to Bonus content as well that people can follow with the notebook. That would get you to 20 minutes without having to blast through the content.