NOTICE: This project is no longer maintained.

Blue Robotics has chosen to retire this project, it is no longer maintained or supported. Bug reports and feature requests are no longer accepted. The repository has been archived and made read-only. The source is still available and can be forked, but this project may be permanently removed from GitHub in the future. For questions and further information, check out the Blue Robotics discussion forums and Gitter channel

SolarSurferMessage

Message definition and supporting libraries for the SolarSurfer project.

Overview

The project defines the command and telemetry definitions for the SolarSurfer project. JavaScript and C libraries are included to ease encoding and decoding messages.

Setup

Get the code:

git clone https://github.com/bluerobotics/SolarSurferMessage.git
cd SolarSurferMessage
npm install

Run the tests:

npm test

Message Formats

Message formats are stored in the src/formats.json file. Formats are defined by an unsigned integer and contain name, payload fields, and multipacket fields. The payload field contains the definition for an array of variables that makes up the comm format. Each variable definition is an object and must have a name and type defined. Variables of type enum and bitmap also must have a map defined. Maps for enums can have up to 256 values and maps for bitmaps can have up to 8 values.

To reduce duplicate variable definitions across formats, variable definitions can be defined in the upper level shared object. These definitions can be reference by defining subsequent variable definitions to the shared object key (a string) instead of an object.

Once message formats are defined, preview the results the info script. This will parse the formats file and verify that all message formats are valid.

npm run-script info

Data Types

The following data types are supported:

Data Type	Number of Bits	Range
uint8_t	8	0 .. 255
int8_t	8	-128 .. 127
uint16_t	16	0 .. 65,535
int16_t	16	-32,768 .. 32,767
uint32_t	32	0 .. 4,294,967,295
int32_t	32	-2,147,483,648 .. 2,147,483,647
float	32	-3.4E38 .. 3.4E38
double	64	-1.7E308 .. 1.7E308
enum	8	the entire value is used in a lookup map
bitmap	8	each bit is an isolated value
char	8	7 bit ascii value
hex	8	00 .. ff

To be compatible with the ARM architecture, all data types are represented in little endian format.

JavaScript API

The JavaScript and C libraries have identical APIs.

Message.encode(msg_object) - returns a hex string of the supplied message
Message.decode(hex_string) - returns the message represented by the supplied hex_string

A typical application looks like this:

var msg = {
    format: 1,
    version: 1
}
var hex = SolarSurferComm.encode(msg);

Cross-Compiling C Library

This package can cross-compile the formats.json file into an AVR-compatible message library. This makes it easy to publish a message to the RockBlock modem on an Arduino-like platform.

npm run-script makeclib

The C files are now available in output/.

Testing Messages Directly

var m = require(‘SolarSurferMessage’); // OR var m = require(‘src/Message.js’)
m.loadConfigFile(); 
m.decode(‘hex string here’)

Change History

This project uses semantic versioning.

v0.2.0 - 2014/10/12

Message format v2
Refactored telem message into a long and short telem message
Added bower config for limited client-side use
- The only function currently supported in a browser is config parsing
Used for Monterey Bay mission

v0.1.0 - 2014/08/08

Initial release
Message format v1
Used for Santa Monica Canyon mission

TODO

TODO: encode images
TODO: decode images
convert to an Angular module that can be used client-side and server-side
use https://github.com/chrisdickinson/bops for client/sever buffer operations

panayotoff / SolarSurferMessage