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Brainstorming

Design notes I made prior to coding anything

Functional Requirements

  • Whole server needs to be hosted and viewed on a slower linux computer - PCM3365
  • Has to visualise rocket and GSE metrics
    • Pre-launch checks (go/no-go)
    • Post-launch monitoring
    • Show status of all important systems
  • Send commands to rocket and GSE (User input will be from a hardware pendant. Not software)
  • Alert of possible issues with rocket
  • Safe and accurate enough to be dependable as a ground control system
  • System will recieve data from ISA or I2C

Non-Functional Requirements

  • Server can be accessable through a router and viewed from other people's devices
  • Modern, clean and cool looking control station interface
  • Interface displays information with graphs, cards, gauges, plots, etc

Wants

In order of priority

  • 2D flight path graph
  • 6 degrees of freedom 3D visualisation
  • Web server accessable by control room for livestream accesability
  • Anything that helps with competition
  • Mobile support
  • Music synced up to fill sequence

Program Design Ideas

Have the telemetry data ingested and trimmed at the lowest level possible. If you can as much of that on the driver level that would be ideal. Then the telemetry data should be stored in the local database with the timestamp and a collumn for each metric/feature. Little to no relations at all. It's got to be a performant time series database. Also, data should be exported to .csv and cleared from the db on boot. The table only needs to store data for one flight at a time. Then have FastAPI send all metrics from a simple timestamp query to the front end. The web interface should update at like 30-60tps and each re-render should query the server cache for a list of changes since last update. The front end should be lightweight and offer basic user interaction and a few different views.

Alternatively, it's worth looking into having the front end run with PHP, laraval and inertiajs while querying straight to db and removing the API level entirely.

Note, broadcast HUD can be transparent web page overlayed on broadcast software with video source for live output visualisation.

Now I'm thinking we use unix sockets to just talk from the ingestion system to the web server. This is designed for inter-proccess communication and runs on memory instead of disk. Then cache data on the web server runtime so you can distribute to clients closer to the data source

Development and production environment ideas

  • Docker for development and native for production
    • I want to be able to pick this up on any machine and just have it work. for devleopment at least. Docker overhead cannot be afforded in production.
    • Docker can limit resources. Such as RAM and CPUs
  • Easy CLI interface. (Python Click?)
    • Use an executable script for starting the software
      • $ rocket run dev - 2 positional arguments here
      • $ rocket run - run production server
      • $ rocket run dev -v --hardware - run dev environment with hardware limits in verbose mode
    • Have a bare bones $ rocket run --cli developed first for an MVP.
  • Handle all production (use docker in dev) program launches from python (db, web server). be resilient of they're already open and maybe note the PID. Then log all of them in the rocket CLI window and handle keyboard interrupt, SIGTERM, SIGKILL, etc.

Example repo tree

project-root/
├── docker/
│   ├── Dockerfile.dev          # Dockerfile for development
│   └── entrypoint.sh          
├── src/
│   ├── app/
│   │   ├── main.?             
│   │   ├── ...
│   └── static/                 # USE SUGGESTED WEB STACK LAYOUT. Example only
│       ├── index.html         
│       └── ...
├── tests/
│   └── ...                     # Could use CI tests too. Figure out later
├── .env                       
├── .gitignore                 
├── README.md                  
├── rocket                      # Custom CLI script in any language. Python?
└── docker-compose.yml

Example rocket CLI script

Note that this could be Python, but just have to add note in README about having it installed (alongside Docker). Then you need the shebang and to run a chown +x command.

#!/bin/bash

... bash here to read args and run stuff

Prospective Tech Stack

Backend

  • Local SQLite database
    • More performant and safe for concurrent read and writes than csv updates
    • Lightweight
  • FastAPI?
    • Websocket connection
    • Lightweight and fast API to handle database interactions
    • Safer and conventional option for handling data compared to csv.
    • Allows for scalability and external clients
  • Apache server
    • Suitable for our dynamic content
  • Vite for web build
    • For quicker development

Frontend

  • Vue TS
    • Lighter and possibly more performant than react.
    • Use TS over JS because typed is just better
    • Probably wont use many features, but this is a good foundation.
  • Tailwind CSS
    • To look cool
  • Three.js
    • Just a 3D library to keep in mind
  • D3.js
    • Standard for data visualisation

Design Ideas

I like the design and type of the vite website

This is what won the competition last year - video