Project Varys

Project Varys is the live telemetry project which will stream real-time flight data from the rocket to the ground station. We are aiming to provide compatibility for 3 transmitters which will be Featherweight, BigRedBee and Telemega.

Featherweight

We use the Featherweight ground station to receive a signal from the featherweight transmitter and when we connect it to a computer, we get access to the packets sent from the receiver through the serial port.

Currently, the grafana and questdb are run locally in docker.

In featherweight_reader.py, we receive the data from the serial port and then filter out the GPS_STAT packets, which can then either be printed out or logged in a file.

In parse_gps_data.py, we retrieve these packets as text form the reader script and then convert these into standardized json objects.

In send_to_questdb.py, we retrieve the json objects and send it into a QuestDB database.

To run varys,

1. Connect the ground station to your computer

2. Run featherweight_reader.py, parse_gps_data.py and send_to_questdb.py concurrently on 3 separate terminals

   (Make sure the that featherweight_reader.py is on the right port, for windows: COM3 or COM4.)

   (DISCLAIMER: 'featherweight_reader' will not work on WSL)

3. Run the docker compose file

4. Set up QuestDB as a datasource on Grafana

5. You're all set to make graphs and visualisations on Grafana!