Is it possible to build a Groundstation without a Raspberry PI?

tany · April 3, 2024, 2:22am

Hi SatNOGS Community!

I am somewhat of a novice satellite enthusiast and a beginner in terms of satellite communications. I found some greate tutorials on how to setup online(and on the SatNOGS website). However, I think all of them involved using a Raspberring Pi and installing the SatNOGS client image onto it. I was curious if it was possible to do this through my laptop itself(without a Raspberry PI) and if there were any tutorials to do so?

Also, I was curious to understand if setting up a station on the network meant receiving signals as well as collecting and interpretting them(weather data in my case). Or whether it was more about collecting signals and uploading them to DB for interprettation(only) by the satellite owner?

Would be great to get any insights into this. Thanks!

pe2bz · April 3, 2024, 11:48am

Setting up with Docker could be the way to go ?

librespacefoundation / SatNOGS / satnogs-client · GitLab

tany · April 3, 2024, 2:18pm

Thanks for the reply!

So would launching the client onto Docker work?

pe2bz · April 3, 2024, 4:10pm

I have 2 cliënts running on one odroid and one in ubuntu.

tany · April 3, 2024, 5:23pm

Ohh, really curious about how’d you go about doing that.

From the info on the webpage, the typical way I see is installing the Raspberry PI debian image and running the client through the given scripts. So do the scripts work on the virtual Ubuntu as well or is there some other way for going about doing this?

pe2bz · April 3, 2024, 6:42pm

It’s not that I am trying to keep it a secret, but the page I did send earlier contains an URL to the instructions

pleira · April 4, 2024, 4:45pm

All my stations are running on Docker, two on a Raspberry Pi 4, and the other two on a Banana Pi R2 router running OpenWRT. I followed this (different) link for the instructions about installing the satnogs-client docker images:

github.com

kng/satnogs-client-docker/blob/main/lsf/LSF-GUIDE.md

# Guide for LSF satnogs-client with docker compose

## Intro
This is aimed for those who want to try out the client in docker and thinks it's a bit too complicated.<br>
I will try to explain the basic concepts and how to get up and running.<br>
My preferred distro is Debian 11 (bullseye) and this guide will be tailored for it, but there should only be small differences to others.<br>

## Basic description of Docker
[Official overview](https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/)

***Images*** are usually hosted on a registry, for example hub.docker.com, from where you can pull them to your system.
They are the complete software bundled to run an application, in this case a debian image and a lot of packages installed that is required for satnogs-client.<br>
***Container*** is the running instance of an image and is basically an isolated environment where you run the app.
They are always start fresh from the image and can be modified, but it's non-persistent so after a stop any changes are lost.<br>
***Volumes*** is either a persistent storage for containers or bind-mounted to your host for configuration or storage.

***Compose*** This is the main difference from the [old guide](../GUIDE.md), where everything is controlled with the [docker-compose](docker-compose.yml).
In this file all the different services (essentially containers) are specified and all it's settings and relationships between them.
The containers exist on a separate network in this configuration, so rigctld runs in its own container and the satnogs-client talks to it over this network.
What this means is that you don't need a bunch of scripts to start/stop/update everything.

This file has been truncated. show original

The configuration section shows how easily you can configure your station.

On the other hand, as your installation is not the official one, there might some extra problems. In my case, I had to fix the permissions for accessing the rtl sdr’s from the docker containers under the /sys/bus/usb/ directory for the OpenWRT installation.

tany · April 11, 2024, 3:26pm

Oh great, thanks a lot for this!

Could I quickly crosscheck if I would still require a Raspberry Pi 4 or a Banana Pi R2 for running this?

TIA!

pleira · April 12, 2024, 9:31am

For the Raspberry Pi 4, you can use the official installation as well. On other systems, like ubuntu and the odroid, the docker installation will be easier to install.

tany · April 17, 2024, 2:48am

Oh Great! Thanks for the reply.

Just to confirm, I won’t really need a raspberry pi 4 when running the client on the debian docker image?

SA2KNG · April 17, 2024, 7:14am

I have been running -client on docker on a bunch of different os; rasbpian, armbian, debian, ubuntu, windows11… also on a bunch of different arches; armv7l, arm64, x86_64, riscv5.
Docker has high demands on the kernel, but that was only an issue on riscv5 and pretty much out of the box on the others.
Windows does work, but I don’t expect USB to work, I used a adalm-pluto over network.

tany · April 17, 2024, 8:52am

Ohk got it, thanks @SA2KNG