A Python wrapper for controlling a K3NG Rotator Controller over serial/USB. This code has a specific bend towards satellite control, as the primary use for us is tracking the HERON MkII satellite.
Dependencies are managed by poetry: poetry install to get 'em all.
Poetry automatically creates a venv instead of installing globally, this is usually a good thing!
For most stuff, this is all you need.
If, for whatever reason, you need this available globally, you can run pip3 install . --break-system-packages, but this carries risks as the command implies.
To install development dependencies, use poetry install --with=dev
See /examples for various ways to control the rotator.
It may be useful to use udev rules to always map the Arduino connected to the rotator to a more meaningful serial devices (such as /dev/ttyRotator), especially if you have multiple serial devices which can change designators across boot.
In my experience, the Arduino can be pretty finicky around its serial connection and not constantly resetting -- tweak the SEND_DELAY and RECV_DELAY variables in k3ng.py if you're having issues with that.
For testing and development, the usage of ipython is reccomended.
There is a useful starter script located in /examples that can help you get started: ipython3 -i ipython_start.py /dev/tty12345
Please note: each time a script is run and a new K3NG object is instantiated, the Arduino will reset!
This will lose the current time, stored state, and stored TLEs.
This is a limitation of Arduinos, not this script; generally this is considered a feature but clearly there are some downsides.
In some cases, it may be useful to have a single persistent serial connection to avoid the aforementioned resets whenever a new connection is created. For that reason, this repo provides the ability to run a RPC server as a service on Linux machines.
To install the script, you can use the install.sh script in the /rpc_daemon directory.
Be warned, it's a pretty risky script with few safeguards and assumes a somewhat specific configuration.
Use at your own risk!
The service installs itself as k3ng_rotator, and can be checked on using sudo systemctl status k3ng_rotator.
By default, it tries to connect to /dev/ttyRotator, and binds to port 18866.
Using it in this remote state is designed to be plug and play with standard local usage.
Instead of calling something like rot = K3NG("/dev/ttyRotator"), instead create an RPC connection:
import rpyc
rot = rpyc.connect("localhost", args.rpc_port).root.k3ngOnce initialized in this way, the K3NG object is exactly the same as if it was running locally, but rpyc will be handling back-and-forth behind the scenes.
Pretty neat!
(ok, not exactly the same, for example tab completion doesn't work quite right currently...)
Again, for development, it is useful to use ipython, and in /examples there is another helper script for RPC environments: ipython3 -i ipython_start_rpc.py
Issues and PRs are always welcome!
If contributing code, please first run the linting + style suite as follows: isort . && black . && flake8 . && mypy ..