Introduction

SatNOGS Comms uses the Yamcs Mission Control system for Telemetry and Telecommanding. The software team has implemented a Docker environment to build everything needed to communicate with SatNOGS Comms board in order to use Telemetry and Telecommands.

Communication between Yamcs server and SatNOGS Comms board can be established using any of the 3 available interfaces. These are:

UHF
S-band
CAN protocol

UHF and S-band interfaces are used for Radio communication with the SatNOGS Comms board. Radio communication needs a Software Defined Radio (SDR) transceiver to get working.

CAN protocol is mostly used in the lab environment for development purposes and this needs a USB to CAN adapter to work.

Example use cases for both Radio and CAN communications between your server and the SatNOGS Comms board are presented below for reference.

UHF and S-band Hardware Setup

For using the UHF and/or S-band interfaces to communicate with the board you do need some hardware setup. In our example we use the USRP B210.

USRP is connected to the host via USB and transmits in UHF or S-band using an appropriate antenna.

On the SatNOGS Comms side, corresponding antenna(s) (based on the band) should be connected on the UHF and/or S-band connector(s).

CAN bus communication hardware setup

To communicate with SatNOGS Comms via CAN bus you need a CAN to USB adapter. In our example we use the CAN bus transceiver TCAN334G.

You can refer to the Connections section of Hardware Setup to see how to set up CAN connections.

Setting up the environment

To set up the environment, the user should follow the next steps:

Clone the repositories and build the docker images:

git clone https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs-comms/satnogs-comms-gateway.git
cd satnogs-comms-gateway
docker build -t satnogs-comms-gateway .
cd ..
git clone https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs-comms/satnogs-comms-yamcs.git
cd satnogs-comms-yamcs
docker build -t satnogs-comms-yamcs .

Note: If a CAN interface is to be used, this should be already up and configured to the proper bitrate before the docker compose command is executed. To do so, execute:

sudo ip link set dev canXX up type can bitrate 1000000

Remarks: The radio container, requires also a USRP to be connected on the host PC.

Start the environment with Docker compose:

Attention: docker-compose.yml file is under contrib/yamcs/ path inside the satnogs-comms-software-mcu repository, so this is where the following command is expected to be executed from.

docker-compose up -d

Now Yamcs is set up!

The web interface is under http://localhost:8090