Installing an ODROID station in the Bolidozor network

This guide presumes a RMDS02C hardware version of the station with an Odroid-X2 computer.

Installed operating system is Lubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The downloaded image has to be decompressed and copied onto an eMMC card. The name of the eMMC card can be found after inserting the card into a card reader and seeing the dmesg listing.

xz -d lubuntu_odroid.img.xz 
sudo dd if=lubuntu_odroid.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
sync

After copying the image to eMMC card, boot the ODROID and do the other settings directly in it. Default login are as follows:

• Username: odroid
• Password: Bolidozor

The image on the SD card has to be adjusted in order to function correctly in the network.

There is an account ‘odroid’ with password ‘odroid’ created in Lubuntu. The odroid user is sudoer. Change the password as soon as possible using passwd command.

Change the station’s name in the following files

/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts

Chang the MAC address in the following file

/etc/smsc95xx_mac_addr

A new MAC address can be generated directly from the command line, using the following command:

$(echo $FQDN|md5sum|sed 's/^\(..\)\(..\)\(..\)\(..\)\(..\).*$/02:\1:\2:\3:\4:\5/')

In this way a new address is generated based on an absolute domain name of the computer. Therefore it is necessary to first change the station’s name and only afterwards generate a new MAC address for odroid.

Change a time zone (set it to UT) and station’s location

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Sometimes it is also necessary to generate a local settings, e.g.:

sudo locale-gen cs_CZ.UTF-8

Finally, expand the ext4 partition using GParted to the full size of the SD card. It is also possible to use odroid-config.

Before the first start, you have to copy a config file nazev_binarky.json from directory containing radio-observer source code to a home directory of ODROID user. This file has to be re-named according to the name of the station and it has to be changed according to the location of a folder where the data about detected meteors will be saved.

Run the detection using the script

~/Bolidozor/netstart.sh

The script can be run directly on the station or it can be redirected, via ssh, to a remote xserver. An example of running ssh with redirecting to xserver of a computer that we kterého provádíme přihlášení (??)

ssh odroid@nazev_stanice -X
~/Bolidozor/netstart.sh

ulimit -c unlimited
~/Bolidozor/frequency_log.py 1 286.0788&
jackd -d alsa -dhw:1&
sleep 3
qjackctl&
sleep 4
jacktrip -q 8 -r 3 -s&
sleep 3
~/Bolidozor/ODROID3/ODROID3&
sleep 3
jack_connect alsa_in:capture_1 system:playback_1
jack_connect alsa_in:capture_2 system:playback_2
jack_connect ODROID3:midi_out system:playback_3

The above-mentioned sample script uses ODROID3 as a station’s name.

Ensures saving a core dump if there is an exception in any application.

Automatically tunes the radio, so that the zázněj (??) of GRAVES carrier frequency was at 10.6 kHz.

Launches JACK server with an audio source from card 1. and using alsa driver.

It can be omited. It launches graphic application that helps to see if the server is running and what is connected to what (??).

Launches jacktrip client for transfer of audio data over a network.

Runs the radio-observer - detected meteors begin to be saved into a directory specified in .json config file.

Interconnects all application in case there is a monitoring station connected to the network.

Source codes of data upload scripts can be found at Bolidozor github.

You can also find them on station in ~/git/RMDS-data-uploader. In order to turn the data upload on, you have to change a ~/git/RMDS-data-uploader/config.py config file according to your station’s name and location of files. Then you can run run.py in screen.

screen
cd ~/git/RMDS-data-uploader/
./run.py

A running screen can be left using key shortcut CTRL-A followed by CTRL-D. When set correctly, the config.py uploader sorts the data and uploads them on the central data server space.astro.cz.

You can run a visualisation of detected meteors on any PC connected to LAN. Follow the sequence of commands (that can be placed to netmaster.sh script):

jackd -r -d alsa&
sleep 3
qjackctl&
sleep 3
~/git/pysdr/pysdr-waterfall&
#~/git/pysdr/pysdr-waterfall -d ~/git/pysdr/detectors/meteor_echo.py&
sleep 3
~/git/pysdr/whistle/whistle -p freqx,-10400:kbfir,41,0,400,100:freqx,400:amplify,200&
sleep 3
jack_netsource -H odroid -i2 -I1 -o0 -O0&

Runs a local JACK server.

A tool for connecting applications in JACK.

Launches waterfall visualisation. In our case, the OpenGL waterfall display pySDR is installed in ~/git/pysdr directory. Pysdr can be dowloaded to this directory using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/MLAB-project/pysdr

Generates sounds of meteors.

Connects JACK to ODROID via network.

It is convenient to create a netstop.sh batch

killall whistle
killall jack_netsource
killall jackd
killall qjackctl

that will terminate everything. Pysdr-waterfall has to be terminated manually by closing its window.

If everything is running, we have to connect everything on both computers using qjackctl or jack_connect.

Connecting the JACK components should look the following way on Odroid

and on PC:

This is how a meteor detected within the sound streem looks like in pysdr

or in radio-observer