ATAK Plugin — Evac Zone
Download Evac Zone 0.4 (pick the one matching your ATAK-CIV version, sideload, then load it in ATAK's Plugins manager):
- ATAK-CIV 5.6: https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/releases/download/v0.4/ATAK-Plugin-EvacZone-0.4--5.6.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.7: https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/releases/download/v0.4/ATAK-Plugin-EvacZone-0.4--5.7.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.8: https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/releases/download/v0.4/ATAK-Plugin-EvacZone-0.4--5.8.0-civ-release.apk
All releases: https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/releases
User guide with screenshots: docs/USER_GUIDE.md (https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md)
PURPOSE AND CAPABILITIES
Evacuation zones on the ATAK map, from the services that publish them: state emergency management agencies, CAL FIRE, and the counties and cities that run their own zone maps. Browsed by state, then by county, the way Cam Depot browses cameras, and drawn in one color language whatever the source calls a status: Order red, Warning yellow, Advisory blue, Shelter in Place purple, Lifted green, Normal faint.
Capabilities:
- A catalog of evacuation services, read from a hosted file so sources can be added, corrected or retired without a plugin release. Every entry is probed by the catalog builder before it is published.
- Pick a state; its statewide feeds are always listed. Pick one or many counties; each shows its share of the statewide feeds ("Monterey in Active Evacuation Zones: Order 8, Warning 4") and the county's own sources.
- Every county of a state is in the picker, from the Census, whether or not anyone publishes a layer for it, with a box to frame it.
- Zones are ATAK feature layers: tap one for its full attributes, and the zone's name is drawn at its center. Live sources refresh on their own interval and survive an ATAK restart from their cached store.
- Cam Depot's visibility tools: a radius from the operator or the map center, in the operator's own units, and a zoom threshold quoted in scale-bar terms.
- A zone list: search by id, name or county, narrow by status with counts, nearest first with distances, Go to and details per zone.
- Each row says what it costs before it is used (feature counts, lag notes) and what is not shown (outside the radius, hidden by the zoom threshold).
Coverage grows the way Cam Depot's did: built and tested in California, with Oregon, British Columbia and two Florida counties from public data. If your state or county publishes evacuation zones and they are not here, point us at the data through the issue tracker below and they go into the catalog without a plugin release.
A step-by-step user guide lives at docs/USER_GUIDE.md in the repository (excluded from the source submission zip).
STATUS
Version 0.4. Verified on ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.3 (Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro), release build with proguard. Compiles against the 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8 SDKs.
Feeds at release: California (Cal OES with CAL FIRE and the county feeds folded in), Oregon (OEM with Deschutes), British Columbia, and hurricane zones for two Florida counties. More states arrive through the catalog, by request.
Prepared for tak.gov third-party submission.
POINT OF CONTACTS
Andreas Johansson, takwerx https://github.com/takwerx/evac-zone/issues
PORTS REQUIRED
(This is important for ATO, networking, and other security concerns)
Outbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) only. Read-only GET requests, no credentials, no cookies, a static User-Agent. Nothing about the device or the operator is sent: no location, no callsign, no identifiers.
Hosts:
- mapdepot.takwerx.org, for the catalog (one small JSON file, read at plugin start). If it is unreachable the copy built into the APK is used.
- The public ArcGIS FeatureServers the catalog lists, only for sources the operator turns on: services.arcgis.com and services1 through services9 .arcgis.com (state and county ArcGIS Online organizations), and gis.napacounty.gov. Each is polled on its own interval, five minutes for live sources, daily for static zone boundaries. Plaintext (http) catalog entries are refused.
No inbound ports. No listening sockets. No traffic to or from the TAK server, and no CoT is generated or consumed. With no network the plugin draws what it last fetched and says how old it is.
EQUIPMENT REQUIRED
Android device supported by ATAK-CIV 5.6, 5.7 or 5.8, with internet access for the sources that are on. Storage is a few megabytes per source.
EQUIPMENT SUPPORTED
Any Android device supported by ATAK. No additional or external hardware, no sensors, no peripherals.
COMPILATION
Standard ATAK plugin build. Set sdk.path in local.properties to an unpacked ATAK CIV SDK, then:
./gradlew assembleCivDebug
./gradlew assembleCivRelease
ext.ATAK_VERSION in app/build.gradle selects the ATAK release to target.
The catalog is built off-device by a Python 3 script (standard library only) that probes every source and refuses one that does not answer, lacks the fields it names, is too large for a phone, or has not been edited in half a year while claiming to be live. Its output is app/src/main/assets/ catalog.json and the hosted copy the plugin reads first.
DEVELOPER NOTES
Sources are ArcGIS FeatureServer layers, fetched as Esri JSON in WGS84 with server-side generalization (maxAllowableOffset), and written into a file-backed FeatureSetDatabase2 drawn by a FeatureLayer3 on the vector overlays stack. A refresh writes the new set, then drops the old one, so the map never goes blank between fetches. The layer object is never recreated: ATAK keeps the labels of layers that are thrown away.
A zone is one feature whose geometry is the polygon plus its center point in a collection, with a label style carrying no text: the point child draws the feature's name, the polygon child (which labels only from a style's own text) stays silent. A separate label feature was tried first and ATAK's tap chooser listed it beside its zone.
Status is normalized from the field the catalog names (StatusColors.java): counties do not agree on words, and Cal OES ships a simple renderer that draws every status the same. Sources without a status field keep the service's own renderer, translated from drawingInfo; points always do.
The zoom threshold is the feature set's own resolution limit, changed in place. The radius rewrites the store from the memory copy when the point has moved a tenth of the radius, coalesced off the GL-thread map-moved callback (never touch a view or a map item there).
Genasys Protect is not a source. Its public WFS answers anonymously but its terms forbid automated use; live status for Genasys counties comes through the state aggregations (Cal OES, CAL FIRE, Oregon OEM), which carry every Genasys county.