Author: M Starch
This project was to take an old RC car and turn it into a command/control rover using the NASA F prime software. This rover will be able to control the motor drive of the RC car, take pictures, and control the helm.
This project uses an Raspberry PI Zero to send the telemetry and events from the down to the ground system running on a user's laptop. The same WiFi link is used send commands from the laptop up to the RC car.
Note: transmission uses TCP packets, a configuration departing from F prime because UDP drops detected in the packet transmission where making JPG photos irrecoverable.
The user must install F Prime, the F Prime GDS, and the Raspberry PI cross-
compile toolchain to /opt/tools. These instructions are available by
consulting the NASA F Prime installation instructions.
See: https://nasa.github.io/fprime
Change into the Rover directory and execute the following commands to generate
a build-cache, build and install the RPI software, and run Linux unit-tests.
fprime-util generate
fprime-util install
fprime-util check
Once all this passes, use scp to copy the binary located at Rover/bin/* onto
the RPI. The system should be ready to run at this time.
scp Rover/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf/Rover pi@<address-of-pi>
## Execution Instructions
To run the software, first start the Ground Data System using the RC car
dictionaries to get the custom defined commands.
fprime-gds -d Rover/ -n
Then using an SSH session onto the PI, run the RPI software. This could be
started on-startup if desired. Although this is outside the scope of this
README.
ssh pi@ pi>nohup ./Rover -a -p 50000 &