Note: the Github repo is not the primary repo; it's here for visibility.
- Mathematica notebook
- Source repository
- Mission control
- Gemini homepage
For a long time, I've had an idea for a project: to simulate a mission to Proxima Centauri on a computer in real time. There's a couple reasons I want to do this: I think it's an interesting exercise in keeping a computer running for a long time (just over 1900 days, if my math is right), and because I'm a space nerd. It just seems like a cool idea. I sketched out the idea in Mathematica, then wrote some Go code.
What exactly is this? I wrote some code that is a very basic simulation of a flight to the star Proxima Centauri. In the real world, I plan to run a single process for nearly five and a quarter years. If it fails or stops, the mission is lost, simulating the requirement for a stable control system for the ship. This means that if I move, I can't just turn the system off. I've set a "launch" date for my 35th birthday, which is when the system is finalized and the simulation can't be touched. That means I'll be just over 40 years old when it finishes, which is a little sobering.
- cmd/flightconn: the flight control software
- cmd/flightconnui: Python code that drives the eInk display
- cmd/flightsim: speedrun the flight to verify the calculations
- cmd/flightsim_test: the flight simulator as a Go test
- cmd/missionctl: the web frontend
- cmd/relay: fetch updates from the flight control software and post to mission control
- comms/: ZeroMQ connectivity; the UI receives updates from the flight control software over ZeroMQ.
- database/: database configuration to talk to mission control
- handler/: HTTP handlers
- milestones/: calculate the various milestones as described in the notebook
- mission/: the flight simulator core software
- ops/: various operations bits, such as the SQL schema and systemd service files
- physics/: the physics calculations behind the software
- rat/: convenience functions for dealing with math/big.Rat
The flight control software runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B.
flightconnruns the flight.flightconnsets up an HTTP endpoint that dumps the current flight information as JSON, and a ZeroMQ publisher that broadcasts updates regularly.flightconnuireceives updates fromflightconnover a ZeroMQ subscriber socket.relayruns as a cronjob to regularly sync flight updates to mission control. It posts updates tomissionctlas HTTP push requests.
missionctl currently runs in a Heroku instance. It receives updates via an
HTTP post.
sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
curl -sSL https://pisupp.ly/papiruscode | sudo bash
sudo papirus-setup
NB: this also installs git.
Add i2c-rtc,mcp7940x=1 to the dtcoverlay to enable the RTC.
sudo apt install libczmq-dev python3-zmq
I install Go using this method.
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Version 1.0.0
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