Not in HamCalc -- But perhaps should be

This is the kind of little program that would be in HamCalc. But doesn't appear to be.

Looking at the Airfoil web page, specifically, this one: http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/details?airfoil=ls013-il.

The measurements are all given in fractions of the depth of the airfoil. So you have to scale them. I was working with what may turn out to be a 48" rudder for a boat based on this design. I'm waiting for some details from the engineer who really knows this stuff.

How do we turn these fractions into measurements for folks that work in feet and inches?

We can use a spreadsheet -- and I suspect many folks would be successful spreadsheeting this data. For some reason, that's not my first choice. I worry about accidental copy and paste errors or some other fat-finger blunder in a spreadsheet. With code, it's easy to reproduce the results from the source as needed.

Here's the raw data.

http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/seligdatfile?airfoil=ls013-il

Part 1. Fractions.

from fractions import Fraction

class Improper(Fraction):

    def __str__( self ):

        whole= int(self)

        fract= self-whole

        if fract == 0: return '{0}'.format(whole)

        if whole == 0: return '{0}'.format(fract)

        return '{0} {1}'.format(whole,fract)

The idea is to be able to produce improper fractions like 47 ½" or 24" or ¾".  My Macintosh magically rewrites fractions into a better-looking Unicode sequence. I didn't include that feature in the above version of Improper. Mostly because in Courier, the generic fractions look kind of icky.

The raw data is readable as a kind of CSV file.

import csv

def get_data( source ):

    rdr= csv.reader( source, delimiter=' ', skipinitialspace=True )

    heading= next(rdr)

    print( heading )

    for row in rdr:

        yield float(row[0]), float(row[1])

That saves fooling around with parsing -- we get the profile numbers from the raw data as a pair of floats. 

Finally, the report.

def report( seligdatfile, depth, unit ):

    scale=16 #th of an inch

    for d, t in get_data( source ):

        d_in, t_in = d*depth, t*depth

        d_scale = Improper( int(d_in*scale), scale )

        t_scale = Improper( int(t_in*scale), scale )

        print( '{0:6.2f} {unit} {1:6.2f} {unit} | {2:>8s} {unit} {3:>8s} {unit}'.format(

            d_in, t_in, d_scale, t_scale, unit=unit) )

This gives us a pleasant-enough table of the measurements in decimal places and fractions.

We can use this for any of the variant airfoils available.  Here's the top-level script.

import urllib.request

with urllib.request.urlopen( "http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/seligdatfile?airfoil=ls013-il" ) as source:

    seligdatfile= source.read().decode("ASCII")

import io

with io.StringIO( seligdatfile ) as source:

    report( source, depth=48, unit="in." )

I'm guessing the data files are ASCII encoded, not UTF-8. It doesn't appear to matter too much, and it's an easy change to make if they track down an airfoil data file what has a character that's not ASCII, but UTF-8.