openfans-community-offical / r2cloud

Decode satellite signals on Raspberry PI

About

r2cloud converts Raspberry PI into the base station which supports various radio signals, such as:

• APT (weather satellite)
• LRPT (weather satellite)
• Cubesats

Screenshots (r2cloud-ui)

    

Principal diagram

Assemble base station

Base station might include different hardware components. Please check recommended bill of materials. This is very basic setup, but it is guaranteed to be working.

Installation

1. Install r2cloud

• From the image. This is simpliest way and require brand new SD card

  • Download the latest official image
  • Insert SD card into the card reader and flash it. You could use Etcher to do this
  • Insert SD card into the card reader and create file r2cloud.txt in the root directory. This file should contain any random string. This string is a login token. This token will be used during initial setup.

• Or from repository binaries. Use this way if you have something already installed on SD card.

  • Login via SSH and create r2cloud.txt file in /boot directory. This file should contain any random string. This string is a login token. This token will be used during initial setup.
  • Execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get install dirmngr
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys A5A70917
sudo bash -c "echo 'deb [arch=armhf] http://s3.amazonaws.com/r2cloud r2cloud main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r2cloud.list"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r2cloud

2. Insert SD card into the RaspberryPi and open https://raspberrypi.local address.
3. Accept self-signed certificate. This is unique certificate that was generated during installation. Once setup is complete, you could enable proper SSL using Letsencrypt.

Design guidelines

• Autonomous:
  • Ability to operate without internet connection
  • synchronize state once connection restored
  • automatically calibrate average absolute error
  • configure base station location based on coordinates from GPS receiver
  • new decoders could be added after auto-update
• Integration with external systems:
  • share as much as possible data with external systems
  • re-use libraries
• Single stack
  • focus on single hardware and software stack
  • optimize it
• Stability
  • housekeeping logs and data based on available hard disk
  • auto-update
  • backward compatibility
• Security
  • safe to expose administration UI to the internet

Details could be found in official documentation.

Contribution

Please read our guidelines.

Contact

Please use gitter

Troubleshooting guide

Frequent errors are combined in our guide.