F' GDS application for non F' flight software or no flight software at all

[mashtijou]

Please help me find out: I like to know if F’ GDS can be used for integration and testing software of any flight Instrument (like a radiometer, radar, spectrometer, etc..) that do not use F’ for their flight software environment and also in some cases the flight instrument may not even have any flight software (instead of flight software it will have FPGA based command/control and telemetry). Will any of the February 2026 workshops help me understand how to develop additional software on F’ GDS to test any of flight Instruments (like radio meters, radars, spectrometers, etc..) while controlling, monitoring, and collecting telemetry and science data from several test equipment and data acquisition unit?

I read through a lot of the online F’ GDS documentation but still not sure how to add to baseline GDS software to communicate with and control a whole bunch of test equipment while sending commands and receive telemetry from non F’ based flight software that runs on an Instrument (like a radiometer, radar, spectrometer, etc..) using F’ GDS. Please advise.

[LeStarch]

The F Prime GDS in its default configuration is really intended to process things that follow the F Prime packet structure. If you want to work with non-fprime software there are two ways to do this:

Convert to F Prime Data Format

You could convert the data format of the embedded system to use F Prime structure. Briefly this would look like:

1. Write up an F Prime dictionary by hand
2. Change the embedded code to produce F Prime data tokens wrapped by F Prime or CCSDS packets

Convert the GDS to Use New Data Format

You could modify the GDS to handle a new data format. This would be done briefly with the following steps:

1. Write up and F Prime dictionary by hand
2. Change the Decoders/Encoders in the GDS to read your format
3. Add a framer/deframer plugin to wrap your data in whatever your format is

Note

You still need the dictionary because that informs F Prime what the data units look like.

Caution

The F Prime GDS, while architecturally capable of such a change, isn't necessarily intended for such a change. There may be unknown unknowns here that take some work. Additionally, there are no guides for this work as it isn't something we've done before.

[celskeggs]

Another option is to write a Linux F Prime application that runs on the same computer as the GDS, parses out the data received from the instrument in a F Prime component, and pushes it to the GDS using the typical GDS interfaces.

This could be a good idea if someone eventually intend to use F Prime for FSW on a compute element that interfaces with your instrument, because the decoding component could potentially be reused in flight.

[timcanham]

@mashtijou You might be better off with something like Grafana.