KerbX Flight Systems

An avionics and mission planning computer for the Rapid Kerbal Delivery System. This project leverages Kerbal Space Program and KRPC to help teach programming concepts for embedded safety-critical systems.

TODO

1. Make sure errors are handled at the highest level and are not set to panic upon happening
2. All Time calculations and associated protobuf definitions should be higher resolution
3. Make sure avionics computer validates flight plan against current craft configuration
4. Make sure avionics computer shuts off all network inputs when it enters ACKLAUNCH state

Workspace Elements

Avionics Computer

Flight Planner

Requirements

The following packages are required prior to building all tooling used and required by kerbx flight systems:

Installing Bazelisk

Bazelisk is the preferred method to install the bazel build system. Bazel is the build system required by krpc.

To install bazelisk you will require npm: sudo apt install npm

The following instructions will install bazelisk via npm locally without the requirement of root privileges.

1. mkdir $HOME/.npm-packages
2. npm config set prefic $HOME/.npm-packages
3. Add the following to your .bashrc (or equivalent for your shell):

NPM_PACKAGES=$HOME/.npm-packages
export PATH="${PATH}:$NPM_PACKAGES/bin"
export MANPATH=${MANPATH}:$NPM_PACKAGES/share/man

4. Open a new terminal and type: npm install -g @bazel/bazelisk

Bazel/Bazelisk will now be installed as the local user.

Refs:

1. https://github.com/sindresorhus/guides/blob/main/npm-global-without-sudo.md
2. https://docs.bazel.build/versions/4.1.0/install-bazelisk.html
3. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/blob/master/README.md

KRPC

You can obtain the version of KRPC used with kerbx flight systems here: https://github.com/drwhomphd/krpc

Prior to starting the bazel build you will need to set two symlinks. First is a symlink to Kerbal Space Program downloaded from Steam and the second is a symlink to where your mono libraries are.

1. Go to the directory where you cloned krpc with git
2. ln -s $HOME/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Kerbal\ Space\ Program $PWD/lib/ksp
3. ln -s /usr/lib/mono/4.5 $PWD/lib/mono-4.5

You can then execute tools/install.sh to build and install KRPC: bash tools/install.sh

Refs:

1. https://krpc.github.io/krpc/compiling.html

Compilation Instructions

First you will need to install rustup in order to manage rust. Instructions for installing Rust for your platform can be found here: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started

We suggest using rustup over your distributions package manager due to the quicker availability of updated compiler version, however package manager versions should work just as well.

Building kerbx flight systems is as easy as typing cargo build in the project directory.

To run kerbx flight systems you can launch either the avionics binary or the flight planner without needing to install either:

• This will display the help for the avionics binary: cargo run --bin avionics -- -h
• This will display the help for the flight planner binary: cargo run --bin flightplanner -- -h