telecon

A cross-platform near real-time telemetry and control GUI for C++ written using the wxWidgets library.

Prerequisite list

Telecon projects use four prerequisite libraries: wxWidgets, wxMathPlot, wxChartDir, and ChartDirector. Not every project uses every library. See the steps below to set up the libraries.

Necessary prerequisite: wxWidgets

Linux

Install wxWidgets 3.2 from https://docs.codelite.org/wxWidgets/repo320/. Note that to develop applications using wxWidgets you may need to install the "development" packages and not just the libraries needed for running the applications using wxWidgets.

After installation, check that the wx-config command works in your terminal. If it does, navigate into telecon/src/ and run make

Windows

• Download the latest stable binary zip files for wxWidgets (v3.2.1 used here).
  • You must download the "header files."
  • Then choose either 32-bit or 64-bit app environments to download the corresponding "development files", "release DLLs", and "release DLL PDB files".
• Unzip the files into C:\wx\3.2.1\
  • The "header files" zip is unzipped as the include subdirectory.
  • The zipped "development files" contain the build and lib subdirectories along with the wxWidgets.prop Visual Studio proerty sheet file.
  • The "release DLLs" and "release DLL PDB files" also unzip into the lib subdirectory adding additional files to it.
• To avoid having to hard-code the install directory of wxWidgets into your applications, define wxwin as an environment variable containing the path (C:\wx\3.2.1) to the files we just downloaded and unzipped.
• If using DLLs, append the location of wxWidget's DLL files to the Path or PATH environment variable. For example, for wxWidgets 3.2.1 64-bit, the default location of the DLL files is C:\wx\3.2.1\lib\vc14x_x64_dll\. This allows the DLLs to be found by your application during runtime.
• Also define a new environment variable wxwin and set it to the directory path of wxWidgets which is C:\wx\3.2.1 in our case. This will allow us to avoid using absolute paths when setting up our Visual Studio solutions.

Included prerequisite: wxMathPlot library

This project ships with a modified copy of the wxMathPlot library. It is an open-source scientific plotting library for wxWidgets. You can find it in lib/wxMathPlot/ and is distributed under the wxWindows license. From June 2007 the project is maintained by Davide Rondini, who carries on the original work by David Schalig. The authors can be contacted via the wxMathPlot's homepage.

Included prerequisite: wxChartDir/ChartDirector

This project includes wxChartDir as a submodule. It provides components for the integration and use of the commercial C++ library ChartDirector, available at https://github.com/utelle/wxchartdir. Use the --recurse-submodules flag when cloning or checking out branches to ensure that wxChartDir is modified appropriately.

wxChartDir includes the trial version of ChartDirector, a versatile charting library that provides support for many different types of plots.

Setting up the development environment

Using the existing projects

• The telecon_example executable project and the telecon library project are already configured for use on x86_64 Windows machines.
• Only wxWidgets must be installed (see above).

Using telelcon with a new project (Visual Studio 2022 or above)

• Install wxWidgets according to the instructions above.
• Create a new empty project.
• Go to View|Property Manager|Add Existing Property Sheet and add wxWidgets.prop (from the downloaded development files in wxWidget's root directory) to it. Then edit the .vcxproj file to make the import path relative to the wxwin environment variable, if desired.
• Set Project|Properties|Configuration Properties|Advanced|Character Set to Use Unicode Character Set.
• Set Project|Properties|Configuration Properties|General|C++ Language Standard to ISO C++ 17 Standard.
• To Project|Properties|C/C++|General|Additional Include Directories|, append $(SolutionDir)..\include, which is where you should place any needed header files. You can use a subdirectory of include instead, if desired.
  • Also append the directories to wxWidgets include files $(wxwin)\include\msvc;$(wxwin)\include;
• Add any needed source files (.c or .cpp) to /src or a subdirectory as needed

If using wxMathPlot:

• To Project|Properties|C/C++|General|Additional Include Directories|, append $(SolutionDir)..\lib\wxMathPlot\include.
• In the Solution Explorer, add telecon\lib\wxMathPlot\include\mathplot.h to Header Files
• In the Solution Explorer, add telecon\lib\wxMathPlot\src\mathplot.cpp to Source Files

If using wxChartDir/ChartDirector:

• To Project|Properties|C/C++|General|Additional Include Directories|, append $(SolutionDir)..\lib\wxchartdir\include and $(SolutionDir)..\lib\wxchartdir\wxdemo\common
• To Project|Properties|Linker|General|Additional Linker Directories|, append $(SolutionDir)..\lib\wxchartdir\lib\win64. Replace win64 with your target platform if needed
• To Project|Properties|Linker|Input|Additional Dependencies|, append chartdir70.lib
• If using the precompiled static lib, telecon.lib : Add it to Additional Dependencies as well (see above point).
  • Likewise, append $(SolutionDir)..\bin\msvc\$(Platform)\ to Project|Properties|Linker|Input|Additional Dependencies|.
• If building from source: In the Solution Explorer, add all files in \src\ and \lib\wxchartdir\wxdemo\common\wxchartviewer.cpp to Source Files.
• When running you application, you will need to link the ChartDirector DLL file. This can be done in several ways. One method, used in the included project, is to copy the DLL to the output folder by setting Project|Properties|Build Events|Post-Build Event|Command Line to xcopy /y "$(SolutionDir)..\lib\wxchartdir\lib\win64\chartdir70.dll" $(OutDir); replace win64 with your target platform if needed. Another method is to add the DLL file to the Path environment variable.

Coding tips

• Be sure to include the headers (wx/wxp.h) or precompiled headers (wx/wxprec.h) as necessary to the main source file.
• Also remember that every app should define a new class derived from the wxApp with an overridden OnInit() function to initialize the program.