Estación Terrena Chitisat (ETC)

Estación Terrena Chitisat (ETC), which literally translates to "Chitisat Ground Station", is a CanSat-alike ground station software developed for my undergraduate university final project. It's developed with PyGObject, a Python 3 package which provides bindings for GNOME's GIMP Toolkit, GTK+ 3. Next is a screenshoot of ETC's GUI running a simulation with some non-sense-but-structured incoming data.

ETC is part of the Chitisat project, a Bolivian didactic satellite similar to a CubeSat, but entirely framed in a typical CanSat mission. Chitisat is under construction at Instituto de Electronica Aplicada (IEA), and haven't been launched to Earth's lower atmosphere yet. If you're interested in learning more about Chitisat, you can take a look here (Go to Chapter 4. Spanish only).

ETC has been conceived to work only for the Chitisat CanSat. However, you can have a taste of its capabilities and play with the code by the means of an Arduino loaded with a simulation program that can send dull data to ETC software.

Please take into account for the time being there is no such thing as a packaged or executable version of ETC, so, you will have to setup the proper development environment including all the required dependencies.

Prerequisites

Setup a proper Python 3 development environment

A functional Python development environment based on Git + pyenv + pipenv + GTK3 (PyGObject) is mandatory. Detailed instructions on how to setup this environment can be found here.

Install OsmGpsMap system libraries

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libosmgpsmap-1.0-1

Find and setup the Arduino port

Arduino boards and other USB-serial devices end up recognized as /dev/ttyACM* or /dev/ttyUSB* in your Linux-based host OS, for example, /dev/ttyACM0.

Communication between Arduino and PC doesn't work out of the box in Linux (as far as I'm concerned), so, a workaround is mandatory.

Next are steps for a first-time only setup. However, some of these commands might be useful if you experiencing issues with the Arduino board connection.

On Linux

1. Open a terminal and type:

$ ls -l /dev/ttyACM*

With your board plugged in will tell you if it'd been recognized and what group(s) can access it. you should see and output similar to this:

crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 oct 22 11:23 /dev/ttyACM0

Note the presence of root and dialout groups. So now it's time to add yourself to the dialout group.

2. Add $YOUR_USERNAME to the dialout group by typing:

$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $YOUR_USERNAME

3. Logout and then log back.

4. Finally, open a terminal and run $ groups $YOUR_USERNAME and look for dialout in the output.

Note: In case group change isn't recognized after the logout/log-back step, try rebooting the system.

On Windows

No special setup is required. Finding the port is really straightforward.

1. Open Device Manager, and expand the Ports (COM & LPT) list.

2. Finally, note the port number ( COM*) of the Arduino board.

Installation

Thanks to pipenv package, ETC and its dependencies installation is really straightforward.

$ git clone https://github.com/amartin1911/ETC
$ cd ETC
$ pipenv install

Aside from PyGObject, ETC is built upon well-documented libraries such as Matplotlib, SQLAlchemy, Bitstring, among others. The full dependencies list can be found on repo's Pipfiles.

Use

On ETCs directory spawn the already installed pipenv environment. Finally run the app!

$ pipenv shell
$ python main.py

Author

• Alvaro Callejas - Initial work - amartin1911

License

This project is licensed under the GNU-GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Philip Chimento, for his MVC pattern GTK implementation example.