Ground Station Software Setup

Software Tools to Install

• VS Code
• git
  • For the Windows git installer, the default options are fine.
• Python 3
  • For now, you don't need to install any virtual environment tools

Git Configuration

1. Using Terminal/Command Prompt, configure your identity for git commits:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

2. If on Linux, set up credential/password caching for git:

git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=10000000'
# Set the cache to timeout after 10 million seconds = 16 weeks

Newer installations of git for Windows and Mac enable this automatically, but here are directions if you need to set it up.

Additional Prerequisites

• Node.js & npm ("Current" version)
  • on Linux:

    curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x -o nodesource_setup.sh
    sudo bash nodesource_setup.sh
    sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
    rm nodesource_setup.sh
    sudo chown -R $(whoami) ~/.npm

  • IMPORTANT: On Windows, Node installation might break your Python launcher file association, causing all your scripts to run with Python 2 (yuck). Fix it by running this in Command Prompt:

    ftype Python.File="py.exe" "%1" %*

Clone the Repository

1. Open VS Code
2. Type Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Pallette.
3. Type "clone" and hit enter to select "Git: Clone"
4. Paste https://github.com/uas-at-ucla/ground-station.git for the repository URL.
5. Enter your GitHub username and password if prompted.
6. Click "Open" in the bottom right to open the cloned folder.
7. Click "Open Workspace" to load the workspace settings.
8. Click "Install All" to install the recommended extensions for the ground-station project.

NPM Dependency Installation

1. Open a terminal to the ground-station folder. The easiest way to do this is by typing Ctrl+`(backtick) or selecting View -> Terminal from VS Code.
2. To install dependencies for the ground station projects, run:

./ground.py build

This will take a while.

Running Code

The ground.py script has various options to build/run different ground station projects. Try ./ground.py --help and ./ground.py run --help.

Ground Station UI - "FlightDeck"

./ground.py run ui

More coming soon!

Editing Code

If you open a '.ts' (TypeScript) file in the ui project, you should notice some handy features made possible by the eslint VS Code extension as well as the .eslintrc.json config file:

• Various warnings/errors are shown that catch potential problems and enforce best practices. It's ok to have some warnings, but they should often be addressed.
• Whenever you save a file, it is auto-formatted.