jambon - tacview / acmi file processing utility

jambon is a small utility designed to help process large tacview (ACMI). It includes CLI tools for searching objects within a tacview, determining object life span, trimming tacviews to specific time frames, and filtering out objects.

Performance

jambon allows the user to optimize for speed or reduced memory usage when running ACMI processing commands. Commands that read ACMI files have a --concurrency flag which determines the number of data-processing routines that will be started. Generally speaking if a command outputs an ACMI file, a --concurrency of 1 will provide a consistent and small memory usage pattern. A larger concurrency value obviously results in less time processing but will require much more memory as data is buffered between stages.

Searching

We can search by any object property and jambon will produce time frames for all relevant objects.

$ jambon search --property "Pilot=Tracer 1-1 | Apothecary" --file example.acmi
Processing file test.acmi...
Object 2051
  First Seen: 2021-07-24T04:00:47Z (47.18)
  Last Seen:  2021-07-24T04:23:00Z (1380.33)
Object 171523
  First Seen: 2021-07-24T04:23:07Z (1387.45)
  Last Seen:  2021-07-24T04:36:22Z (2182.34)
Object 348163
  First Seen: 2021-07-24T04:36:54Z (2214.48)
  Last Seen:  2021-07-24T04:49:39Z (2979.97)
Object 551171
  First Seen: 2021-07-24T04:51:16Z (3076.77)
  Last Seen:  2021-07-24T04:54:36Z (3276.82)
Object 578051
  First Seen: 2021-07-24T04:54:39Z (3279.72)
  Last Seen:  2021-07-24T05:32:01Z (5521.57)

Or perhaps you prefer structured data:

$ jambon search --property "Pilot=Tracer 1-1 | Apothecary" --file example.acmi --json | jq '.'
[
  {
    "object": {
      "Id": 2051,
      "Properties": [
        {
          "Key": "T",
          "Value": "3.3380541|6.0067414|44.88||4.7|95.6|242348.11|-5254.55|92.5"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Type",
          "Value": "Air+FixedWing"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Name",
          "Value": "AV8BNA"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Pilot",
          "Value": "Tracer 1-1 | Apothecary"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Group",
          "Value": "Ford 3"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Color",
          "Value": "Blue"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Coalition",
          "Value": "Enemies"
        },
        {
          "Key": "Country",
          "Value": "us"
        }
      ],
      "Deleted": false
    },
    "first_seen": 47.18,
    "last_seen": 1380.33
  },
...
]

Trimming

Once we have a time frame we can utilize the trim functionality to produce a much smaller ACMI file.

$ jambon trim --input before.acmi --start-at-offset-time 3279.72 --end-at-offset-time 5521.57 --output after.acmi
Collecting frames between 3279.72 and 5521.57...
Sorting 47240 collected frames...
Writing 47240 frames...