Description
The Meerkat ground station is a ground operations centre for centralising data on a rocketry site.
The system comprises of a physical box that hosts several web UIs that provide data on various subsystems involved in the ground operations.
Components
User Interface
V1
The first version involved a screen that displayed the status of the systems and a map of personell in the field.
This worked as a static display bust was not flexible enough for the desired use case as there was no way to interact with the system beyond the buttons that were pre-programmed.
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V2
The second version removed the screen and utilised the wifi card on the Jetson to host an access point.
This access point was used to connect to a Grafana visualiser and a custom map viewer.
By changing it to this version, new pages could be added the the nginx router and functionality could be added in a significantly more modular way.
RF Network
The network between the ground station and any in-field devices is facilitated by a set of LoRa modules operating in the 915 MHz band.
These devices include any rocket flight computers (eg. Ibis) and any recovery trackers for personnel.