Ground Control Station Software

KSHITEEJ MAHAJAN

PURPOSE OF GCS SOFTWARE

• GCS Software responsible for:– Receiving Data from the CanSat at Ground Station

in real time– Storing the received raw data– Processing this raw data in real time to show

meaningful data in presentable manner via graphs or map plots

VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF GCS SOFTWARE

Receiving Antenna connected via USB port to your GCS PC/Laptop

Storing the received raw

data

Processing this raw data in real time to get real time graphs

GCS SOFTWARE WORKSHOP

• We will learn to create a system that will cater to all roles required of GCS software

• This will be a really simple module and you can improvise on this or take a different approach for designing your own for the competition

• The language we will be using for the workshop: Java

1: PORTING DATA FROM USB TO A FILE

• We need to interact with the USB port from within the Java program

• We use the javaxcomm library for this. You can get it at: http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/picdev/software/javaxcomm.zip

• Let’s see how to use this library

1: PORTING DATA FROM USB TO A FILE

• Configuration steps once you download javaxcomm:• comm.jar should be placed in:

%JAVA_HOME%/lib%JAVA_HOME%/jre/lib/ext

• win32com.dll should be placed in:%JAVA_HOME%/bin%JAVA_HOME%/jre/bin%windir%System32

• javax.comm.properties should be placed in:%JAVA_HOME%/lib%JAVA_HOME%/jre/lib

1: PORTING DATA FROM USB TO A FILE

• Let’s see a sample program

2: PROCESSING & PLOTTING DATA

• For real time plotting of data you can use an open source library. For java an example open source library is LiveGraph. It is available for download at: http://www.live-graph.org/download.html

• Let’s see the nature of data and it’s plot in live graph application

3: TRAJECTORY PLOTTING IN GOOGLE EARTH

• GPS data can be viewed in Google Earth• For this we need to create an appropriate KML

file• Just like HTML file is to a browser, KML file is

to Google Earth application• Let’s see a typical KML file• We have to auto-generate this KML file from

the GPS data

CHOICE OF PLATFORM

• Here we have outlined a simplistic Java based application for GCS software

• You are welcome to not use this and use other libraries in other programming languages. You can also use MATLAB for reading data from USB port and designing a UI for plotting the same in Matlab

REAL WORLD PROBLEMS

• The raw data we get from the CanSat may have errors as loss of data or the data being incorrect due to wireless mode of transfer from the CanSat to the GCS

• A real world ground station software needs to take care of these

THANK YOU !