Ground station web application for Western University Aero Design Mega-Team
The ground station runs a React frontend and a Node.js backend with a Mongo DB database. Data is passed to the Docker containers via a USB tool over a Webscoket. There is also an option OpenStreetMap container for serving map tiles to the map display.
git clone https://github.com/UWO-Aero-Design/gnd-station.git
cp sample.env .env # copies environment variables, modify as necessary
docker compose up frontend api dbNote: because of an issue with Google's Protocol Buffers, a quick patch is automatically run via [to be moved to USB driver tool]npm run patch, which turns on certain assertions to allow for nested messages.
The backend api is available on http://localhost:5000 for HTTP requests and Websocket connections. The React server will be live on http://localhost:3000. To view logs from the frontend, backend, or database, instead of all three combined, open a new shell and use docker compose logs <api|frontend|db> -f. You can list multiple services to combine outputs (eg. docker compose logs api frontend -f). Alternatively, you can start each service separately by using docker compose up frontend, docker compose up backend, docker compose up db in three separate shells.
When done development, use docker compose down to clean everything up.
Due to limitations in Docker being able to access USB devices on the host machine, a "usb tool" has been provided which will communicate over the NodeJS server's Websocket to deliver telemetry and send commands to/from the ground station hardware. To begin using this, open a new shell and start the usb tool:
node usb/usb_tool.jsOnce started, the NodeJS internal data driver will have to be switched from the default, sample driver. Send a POST request to http://localhost:5000/driver/current with a JSON body of { "driver_name": "USB_DRIVER" }. This can be done with Postman, cURL, or the frontend, once it is implemented. Note: you must have the Aero ground station hardware plugged in or some hardware equivalent, otherwise no data will be read from the device (this uses the internal Aero Message Protocol).
In order to reset the database, bring the containers down with docker-compose down, delete the db folder and then restart the database with docker-compose up.
You can connect to the database with a visual GUI such as Compass. The link is provided in the nodejs console upon successful connection and is of the form mongodb://<username>:<password>@<hostname>:<port> (the hostname will be "db" instead of "localhost"). You can also use Postman to simulate HTTP requests to the backend.
Map tiles are provided by OpenStreetMap running in a Docker container. The rendered files are fairly large so you can use BBBike to download smaller PBFs. You must first import the files into a docker volume and then render them for use by OSM. Note: you must use the absolute file location in the following commands (use pwd command to get your current directory). Ensure you are in the top level folder when executing the following commands.
docker volume create osm-data osm-rendered
docker run -v /absolute/path/to/london.pbf:/data.osm.pbf -v osm-data:/var/lib/postgresql/12/main overv/openstreetmap-tile-server import
docker-compose up
The imported files are stored in a docker volume called osm-data and the rendered files in a docker volume called osm-rendered. These will not be deleted when running docker-compose down so delete them when you're done using docker volume rm osm-data osm-rendered.
Just like the actual groundstation, testing is also run within a docker container. To run the tests, use the command docker compose up unittest-backend at the root of this repository.
Currently testing is only done on the backend (api) and is limited to unit tests. The tests also have a problem where they are unable to gracefully shutdown, however, they can still be run as they produce the correct output. In the future we want to expand to unit tests for the frontend, and integration tests (selenium).
The API documentation is available at the http://localhost:5000/docs/docs.