Ground Station
The ground station is a collection of APIs, interfaces, and team-written processing code that serves as a bridge between iridium packets sent to/from the Alpha CubeSat and the front-end/back-end interfaces that make the bytes of data user-centric and understandable. The diagram below details different parts of the ground station and how they interact with each other.
Orginal creator of diagram: Maxwell Anderson
The Control UI is a tool developed by the Alpha Software team members (current and former). It allows for uplinking commands to the CubeSat and changing values. A screenshot of this interface is shown below.
The front end of the ground station has two main components. One is the Kibana dashboard which shows downlinked data from the Cubesat. This includes data such as plots of gyroscope values, the current mission mode, and battery voltage among other characteristics. The Kibana UI also allows for viewing raw data for reports in a JSON format. A screenshot of the current interface is shown below.
This part of the back-end unit has been developed by Alpha Software team members. It connects with the RockBlock API as well as Elasticsearch. The ground station code processes report as they are downlinked and first appear in the RockBlock portal. From there, once the stream of bits has been transformed into a more user-friendly format -- the code is pushed to the ElasticSearch database.
Elasticsearch is the database used to store report data that has been downlinked from the CubeSat. It connects to the Kibana dashboard leading to seamless updates whenever a new time range is selected.
Below is a diagram showing how reports are processed in the ground station backend.
There are 3 main types of reports that the Ground Web Services part of the ground station currently processes.
- Normal Report
- IMU Downlink Report
- Camera Report
The Normal report downlinks a variety of satellite-specific general data.
Format for downlinked data.
The Camera report downlinks image fragments. The Ground station then assembles these image fragments and creates a full image.
Format for downlinked data.
| Index | Data |
|---|---|
| 0 | 42 (flag in decimal). |
| 1 | Image Serial Number |
| 2-5 | Fragment Number |
| 6-report.size()-1. | Fragment Content |
The current testing file in the CubeSat back end is called test2.clj. There are examples of "sample reports" written in the file. To run the file complete the following tasks
- Make sure you are connected to the Digital Ocean Droplet with the correct credentials.
- Cd into the following directory
Alpha-Cubesat-Ground-Station/cubesat-backend/src/cubesat_clj - Run following command
lein repl - A line should pop up with the following text
cubesat-clj.test2=>. Type in (-main) next to the ">" character and press enter to run the tests.
The backend has logging implemented so it will print out the names of the functions (detailed flowchart above) as they are executed. The output data should appear in the "discover" section of Elastic Search. An example output with Ground Station logging is shown below:
