Discussion Telemetry Client

[indy91]

I've been working a bit on LM telemetry. Most of the data being sent in low bitrate should soon be available in the PCM. We have an old telemetry client, which currently only resides here: https://github.com/Thymo-/telemetryClient It was quite advanced for the CSM (you can display CMC data, uplink commands etc.), but was never made compatible with the LM. It's also super outdated and doesn't build in newer Visual Studio versions. I'm not very familar with the syntax the code uses unfortunately.

Anybody interested in trying to update it? I guess the first step would be to try and make it build in Visual Studio 2017. @Thymo do you want to attempt that?

The endgame would be to simulate whole MCC consoles using the telemetry stream. Some would already be full of available data, like GNC, TELMU, GUIDO.

I guess this can also serve as the new discussion thread for the telemetry client.

 

[dseagrav]

The LM was really broken back when I wrote that - it doesn't support LM telemetry because there was none. I also never found the telemetry "slot" assignments for the LM. Or was it measurement IDs? I don't remember.

In any event, it was more a demonstration and means of driving the CMC than anything. Almost none of the systems telemetry really worked. Writing a new client from scratch would almost certainly be a better idea.

As for making actual consoles, I never did find the screen layouts for the real consoles. I suppose you could just make them up.

Edit: My intended endgame for the telemetry system was to make a Unix program that used ncurses to replicate the real displays, so you could build a physical MCC out of terminals running telnet or ssh. There would be a server program that took the spacecraft datastream and distributed it to the terminals. You'd have a group of people playing MCC for another group of people flying the spacecraft. It was intended for a museum scenario or something like that. That was then, though - now, the more I write about this the more unworkable it sounds.

 

[indy91]

I've done a little bit of work on the telemetry client myself, available here: https://github.com/indy91/telemetryClient

It is buildable in Visual Studio 2010 (even there with some warnings that functions used are deprecated) and I did a few smaller updates to add measurements that are now simulated. I've tried a little bit updating it to Visual Studio 2017, without much success. To me it seems like that might be more of an effort than create a new and better telemetry client that is also compatible with the LM.

For LM measurements I have used the LM-8 Systems Handbook, which wasn't available back in the day. The LM PCM class was already full of telemetry descriptions, just nothing there to measure.

There is a document about the MCC consoles as they were for Apollo 15, not sure it describes the screens itself much, mostly the buttons and other display. And the screens could be switched to multiple possible displays anyway.

 

[macieksoft]

Back in the time i was thinking about making my own. But it would require understanding on how to decode incoming data. It should be possible to find some fonts that would mimic the one used on actual MCC displays, the problem would be recreating all the video pages, there is very little evidence on how they actually looked.

Some scenes from movie Apollo 13 shows MCC and to my surprise it seems quite realistic, consoles are matching the data i have (they are from Apollo era, you can tell by incandescent 7 segment displays showing the video page near each screen, they were later removed for Space Shuttle flights AFAIR).
Here you can see it: https://youtu.be/C3J1AO9z0tA?t=1m53s
You can even see blinking asterisks ( * ) near off scale paramateres, this is also a known feature.