Repository files navigation

Author: M Starch

This project was to take an old RC car and turn it into a command/control roverusing the NASA F prime software. This rover will be able to control the motordrive of the RC car, take pictures, and control the helm.

This project uses an Raspberry PI Zero to send the telemetry and events from thedown to the ground system running on a user's laptop. The same WiFi link is usedsend commands from the laptop up to the RC car.

Note: transmission uses TCP packets, a configuration departing from F primebecause UDP drops detected in the packet transmission where making JPG photosirrecoverable.

The user must install F Prime, the F Prime GDS, and the Raspberry PI cross-compile toolchain to/opt/tools. These instructions are available byconsulting the NASA F Prime installation instructions.

See:https://nasa.github.io/fprime

Change into theRover directory and execute the following commands to generatea build-cache, build and install the RPI software, and run Linux unit-tests.

fprime-util generatefprime-util installfprime-util check

Once all this passes, usescp to copy the binary located atRover/bin/* ontothe RPI. The system should be ready to run at this time.

scp Rover/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf/Rover pi@<address-of-pi>## Execution InstructionsTo run the software, first start the Ground Data System using the RC cardictionaries 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 bestarted on-startup if desired. Although this is outside the scope of thisREADME.

ssh pi@pi>nohup ./Rover -a -p 50000 &