Rover Processes

This is all the software that runs on the rover (that we wrote our selves).

Programs that go here should be relatively self contained, if you have multiple files, put them in a folder with the program entry being clearly named. If you have more than a few files, consider creating a library in a new repository instead.

Install/Setup

Make sure you have Python3 and pip3 installed, and do:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

This should install all the third party packages. Some processes may have additional software that needs to be installed to run. These processes are:

• YagiSdrProcess.py: Needs gqrx for the Raspberry Pi.
• LoadCell.py: Needs the libphidgets22 library.

You will also need the robocluster library installed. Instructions for that are on it's Github page. It is recomended that you clone the source and install it with the -e flag, as it makes updating robocluster as easy as just pulling from the robocluster repo.

If you write a new process that needs a new python library, please add it to the requirements.txt so that the above install command actually installs everything that is needed.

Running the software

To run the rover software, run the main.py script:

python3 main.py

This will start up all enabled processes. Ctrl-C will halt all processes. There may still be issues with Ctrl-C not working on Windows, someone should figure that out at somepoint :). To changes which processes are enabled, open main.py and find the process_list variable. Comment out entries in the list to disable processes, and uncomment them to enable them. Adding new processes is done by simply adding a new RunOnce instance to the list, just like the existing processes. Note that scripts need to be in the same directory as main.py, if you need to run something that is stored somewhere else (such as the web UI), use the cwd parameter to the RunOnce constructor.

More details about how the ProcessManager works can be found in the robocluster documentation.

Configuration

Various settings can be found in config.py. Any constants that multiple processes will use should go in config.py. Descriptions of all options are documented in comments. Please update the comments if you change the behaviour or add new settings. Most important setting is network. If none of the processes seem to be talking to each other, it is likely because network is not set properly.

Logs are written to a folder called logs, and are saved with the date and time the software was started as the filename. They are ignored by git.