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acebrianjuan / gnss-sdr-monitor

A graphical user interface to monitor the GNSS-SDR status in real time
GNU General Public License v3.0
84 stars 37 forks source link

Port names confusing #11

Open lenhart opened 3 years ago

lenhart commented 3 years ago

Hey,

I find the port names a bit confusing. We have Montior_PVT port and GNSS_Synchro port in the settings menu, but Monitor and PVT streams from GNSS-SDR. This is a bit unintuitive at first glance. Can I rename them to the GNSS-SDR equivalents, or are there reasons which I have not yet seen why the names are how they are?

Thanks again for the good work! Cheers

acebrianjuan commented 3 years ago

Hi @lenhart,

I find the port names a bit confusing. We have _MontiorPVT port and _GNSSSynchro port in the settings menu, but Monitor and PVT streams from GNSS-SDR.

I agree. This is something I have thought about too :)

This is a bit unintuitive at first glance. Can I rename them to the GNSS-SDR equivalents, or are there reasons which I have not yet seen why the names are how they are?

In essence, I decided to label the ports based on the serialization object that each port expects to receive from GNSS-SDR. The Monitor block streams Gnss_Synchro objects and the PVT block streams Monitor_Pvt objects, hence the names you see in the Preferences window. I probably had a good reason for doing it like this back then but, certainly, naming ports based on low-level implementation details is far from ideal and can lead to confusion as you say.

The fact of the matter is that GNSS-SDR has evolved since then: A few months ago, we got a very nice pull request (https://github.com/gnss-sdr/gnss-sdr/pull/437) which added monitoring streams to the Acquisition and Tracking blocks[1] and, just a few days ago, the PVT block was added the capability of streaming GPS and Galileo ephemeris data (see https://github.com/gnss-sdr/gnss-sdr/commit/172143101071ede7c7d7afc588ba49913fffd0d7).

In the (hopefully) not-too-distant future I wish to update the GUI and use all these new streams. This will require adding 3 new UDP ports among other internal changes. So this new scenario will demand rethinking the port names as you have pointed out. I envision to use the following port names:

I would like to know your thoughts about this. Thank you.

Álvaro

[1]: More info about how it works here: https://sourceforge.net/p/gnss-sdr/mailman/message/37149141/

lenhart commented 3 years ago

Hi @acebrianjuan,

thank you so much for the additional resources and clarifications. Now I see the reason for the naming of the ports. Didn't have the underlying class names in mind.

Removing the monitor from the Monitor_Pvt port alone will help to reduce the confusion how to connect the two sides: GNSS-SDR GUI
Monitor stream GNSS_Synchro port
PVT stream Monitor_Pvt port

because they no longer seem to both fit to the Monitor_Pvt port.

Otherwise the naming seems very good to me. Only the Observables port still could be confusing, because in the current GNSS-SDR system design, the monitor block is not part of the observables but stand-alone. Don't know if that design will be changed in the future now that various blocks have their streaming capabilities, but maybe name it Observables/Monitor for clarity?

Best ragards Malte