Obtaining access to the “Scratchpad - New Users” folder to build dashboard

SatNOGS
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Dear SatNOGS community,

I am writing to request access to design a dashboard for our satellite mission ground station Our Website as we take our first steps toward joining the SatNOGS community. We believe that designing a dashboard will help us better understand our ground station performance and improve our satellite data collection.

We are excited to be joining the SatNOGS community and believe that our project aligns well with the community’s goals of democratizing access to satellite data and promoting open-source technology. Our dashboard design will be open source and will be shared with the community to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing.

To complete our dashboard design, we will need access to the Scratchpad folder New User

We believe that our project will benefit the SatNOGS community and are happy to answer any questions or provide additional information as needed. Thank you for considering our request.

Best regards,

Azhan Kamil

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Hi @azhan.kamil and welcome to the community!

About the permissions, in order to give you and your team members edit permission you need to log in at least once in the dashboards site. The credentials are the same with the one you used for the forum here. When you login let me know with a pm here and I’ll give the permissions you need, the same for the rest of your team members.

About the dashboard you want to build, correct me if I’m wrong, you want to build a dashboard for your satellite, right? If yes, then we may need to partially integrate your satellite in SatNOGS (initially on the dev environment where you can experiment) and make its data available for the grafana dashboards.

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Great news! I’ve already logged in and confirmed that we would like to build a dashboard for our satellite. As we’re currently in the testing phase, integrating our satellite with SatNOGS would be extremely beneficial for us.

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I’ve given you the permissions, you should be able to create/edit/copy dashboards.

What frequency are you going to use for the satellite? Will it be radio amateur? If yes have you applied for frequency coordination with IARU?

I’ll post here later today a detailed post with what is needed for SatNOGS integration.

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Please @fredy tell me about the satnogs integration

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oops it looks like I forgot to post it, I’ll do later today or tomorrow.

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Sorry for the delayed answer… So here are some steps for a satellite to integrate with SatNOGS:

  1. Adding the satellite and its transmission details in SatNOGS DB

Currently we are in a transition phase on how this is performed, so there are two ways:

a) You can open an gitlab issue in satnogs-ops repository as described in the related wiki page by using the “add_satellite” template for the description field.

b) Add directly a suggestion in SatNOGS DB by logging in, going in the satellites page and at the top right click on the edit button. After the suggestion review you will be able to add suggestions for the transmitters as described in the “Suggesting transmitters” section of the related wiki page.

  1. Demodulator - gnuradio flowgraph

In satnogs-flowgraphs repo there are the currently used gnuradio flowgraphs. Some of them are generic and some more satellite specific. If any of these can be used for demodulating your satellite transmissions then there is no need to add any extra flowgraph. Otherwise you will need to add one, which have in mind that it may take a while to be reviewed, accepted and deployed in Network’s clients.

  1. Satellite Decoder

In order to decode the demodulated data you need to create a decoder by describing the schema of your encoding in a kaitai struct. In the README file of the related repo there are details how to start. You can also get in contact with @DL4PD for any specific questions. You can find him (as oldbug) also in the #satnogs matrix channel for more direct communication.

  1. Dashboard

In order to create a dashboard in our Grafana instance that will visualize the decoded data from your mission we need to populate the DB with some data. This can be done with performing some tests by using our two dev instances for DB and Network.

There are two approaches:

a) The simplest one is to push some data in DB (db-dev instance for the testing) and get them decoded and pushed to the dashboard’s database, this will make the data available and get you started with building your dashboard.

b) The extended version, that will also test the demodulator, is to setup a satnogs ground station(satnogs-client) and connect it in the Network (network-dev instance for the testing). Then you can schedule an observation of your satellite in your station and then transmit locally what your satellite would have transmitted. This way you will get an observation with demodulated data that will be sent to DB and get decoded and be available for building the dashboard.

For any questions for the test process and adding data in DB with either way you can contact me or find me (as fredy) in the matrix channel.

For help on building the dashboard and getting the appropriate permissions please contact @DL4PD as described above or @Kevin.

  1. Extra step - Inform Community

This is an extra step but important to make the SatNOGS community aware of your mission and make sure that they will observe it regularly.

For this step you need to open a forum thread in the community forum in the launches section. I can help you with this if you can give me more details on when your deployment will happen.

This thread is usually for watching all the missions deployed from a launch, if you intend to give regular updates on your mission, for example announce certain transmissions/events etc then I suggest you open an extra thread specific to your mission. Check for example Ramsat and Geoscan-Edelveis missions threads.

I know the process is kind of complicated but we are here to help you through all these steps.

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