UVic Rocketry Ground Station Software (Proof-of-Concept)

This software uses a software defined radio and the APRS protocol to track a rocket in flight and display its location and altitude in real time. It was succesfully used to recover two rockets flown by the UVic Rocketry team at the Spaceport America Cup in 2017. That being said, this was only intended to be a proof-of-concept, and as a result the design is not ideal for maintainability and further modification. We have already begun applying the lessons we learned from this project towards what will hopefully be a more robust successor.

This readme describes basic setup information. For a more in-depth description of the system, see the documentation directory.

OS & Hardware Recommendations:

This project was developed for Ubuntu 16. Other Linux distros should also work, provided that all the dependencies are supported.

You'll also need an "rtl-sdr" software defined radio usb device. Information about this sort of device can be found at https://www.rtl-sdr.com/.

The software is designed to track a BigRedBee BeeLine GPS device, but could be modified fairly easily to work with other APRS-based GPS transmitters.

Installation:

Install dependencies as described in documentation/installation.txt (or try running that file as a script if you're feeling lucky).

If you're only interested in testing the GUI and not the decoding components, some of the dependencies will not be necessary. More information can be found in the installation.txt file.

Testing Dependencies:

Test rtl-sdr/rtl_fm by plugging in your SDR stick and running the script server/decoder/testingtools/hearsdr.sh. If you're not in Victoria, pass in the frequency of a local FM radio station (e.g. ./hearsdr.sh 90.5M).
This script should play music from the radio (assuming you have aplay installed).

You can test direwolf by going to the server/decoder directory and running runtest.sh.

Running the Webapp:

First start server/wsserver.py, and then open client/index.html in a web browser.

Note: This repository's history has been modified to remove some private information. As a side effect, older commits may not run as expected!

Copyright & Licensing:

This repository includes distributions of the Flot charting library, the OpenLayers mapping library, and jQuery, as well as the "Lato" font.
The licenses for Flot and for Lato can be found in their respective directories. The OpenLayers and jQuery files contain links to their respective licenses.

Otherwise, everything not listed above is released according to the MIT license as described in LICENSE.txt