Verne

Verne is the second generation data collection and logging software for the VIP team Lightning from the Edge of Space at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

The software is designed to be run on a Docker container where a number of software libraries will be installed. As a result, the docker-ce package is required. Run the following command to install Docker:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh

After installing docker, you also need to make sure that you have a copy of the built gtviples/verne-deps image. Click here for details on building that image.

Building the Image

The Docker image is not available at the moment on the Docker hub, as a result, you need to compile it using the following command:

docker build -t gtviples/verne .

Installing and Running

Easy, automated setup:

• The docker image can be built using sudo ./scripts/build-image.sh
• The container can be created using sudo ./scripts/create-container.sh
• The startup settings can be configured using sudo ./scripts/startup-config.sh

Manual setup:

To run the project, a container must be created with this image and the correct parameters. For example:

docker create \
    --name=verne
    --device /dev/ttyAMA0 \
    --device /dev/i2c-1 \
    -v /home/pi/vernedata:/data \
    gtviples/verne

Then, the container can be started and stopped using the docker start verne and docker stop verne commands.

Note that we are not running this container with a restart policy because of the fact that we want the code to run just once. As a result, we need another way of making sure that the container is started on startup.

We start by making sure that the responsibility of starting docker is on systemd and not on upstart:

echo manual | sudo tee /etc/init/docker.override
sudo systemctl enable docker

We will use a systemd service setup to ensure that our container is run on boot. Create a file /etc/systemd/system/verne.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Verne
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service

[Service]
Restart=no
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker start -a verne
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop -t 5 verne

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

For convenience, this file is provided in the repository in the scripts/ directory so that you can just copy and paste it.

To run the service, do the following:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start verne.service

And to set it to start on startup, do the following:

systemctl enable verne.service

Built With

• Docker - The container-based deployment system
• PySerial - A library for interfacing with UART Serial devices
• RTIMULib2 - A library for interfacing with Inertial Measurement devices

Contributing

Please branch the code and create pull requests instead of merging or committing on the the master branch yourself. These pull requests will be reviewed by the lead developers before merging. As an overall principle, only production-ready code should be on the master branch.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• Cem Gokmen - Initial work - skyman

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

This project was named after French author Jules Verne whose novel Cinq semaines en ballon was what first introduced the project's developer to the concept of aerostats.