SatNOGS Monitor with current Raspberry Image (Docker access)

SatNOGS Software
1

Hello fellow Linux tinkerers,

I recently installed a fresh raspi with the official SatNOGS image. This one is highly integrated with ansible and docker.

Is there a clean way to access the /tmp/ folder to make the SatNOGS Monitor work with waterfall? As far as I am aware of it is not possible to export/mount tmpfs from docker to the host.

Or maybe is there a cleaner way to achieve this?

Thanks a lot!

2

Hello pr357on,

co-maintainer of satnogs-monitor here. If you have some understanding and experience with linux, I’d defnitely recommend to install satnogs-client manually as per this manual:

While this will solve your problem with the /tmp/ dir, this has also some other advantages:

  • Way less memory footprint (as this omits the docker container)
  • More easy hacking, as you can just modify the code locally
  • You can use the client with standard debian tools (i.e. systemctl and journalctl)

Feel free to reach out, if you need an example for the systemd unit file.

If you are not that proficient in linux, I’d recommend you to stick with the docker-stack, though.

Are you sure, that you can not export the tmpfs of the docker container? At a short google search showed me this: tmpfs mounts | Docker Docs I didn’t check in detail, though.

I’d suppose that it should be possible to export the containers tmpfs somewhere into your host-partition. From that point on, you should be able to configure that path in satnogs-monitor via CLI or the config file.

3

Thank a lot for your ideas to this topic! I will try again the tmps export, but I guess it will be much better for my needs to build the whole thing from scratch (like to mentioned).

I’d like to build some API tools and include epaper status and such small things. But most important would be a direct access to the container to fine adjust LNA and gain of the SDR - and to use the monitor via SSH.

4

Glad I was able to help. If you decide to build from scratch (which is really not that much work), you can adjust the SDR-Gain very easily in the .env config file:

# General settings
SATNOGS_API_TOKEN="GIVE_TOKEN_HERE"
SATNOGS_STATION_LAT="52.073657"
SATNOGS_STATION_LON="12.462608"
SATNOGS_STATION_ELEV="50"
SATNOGS_SOAPY_RX_DEVICE="driver=uhd"
SATNOGS_RF_GAIN="70"  # Adjust gain here.
SATNOGS_RX_SAMP_RATE="1e6"
SATNOGS_RX_BANDWIDTH="600e3"
SATNOGS_ANTENNA="TX/RX"
SATNOGS_UDP_DUMP_HOST="127.0.0.1"

This is an example from one of my stations. As Devops-Person, I find this approach more accessible than running the ansible-setup every time.

If you need a starting point for your env-file, you might checkout this draft project: SatNOGs-Wizard

This can generate you an env-file. The code is here: GitHub - akira25/satnogs-config-generator: repo to test github-pages

Have fun! I’m really interested to hear more from the epaper-stuff in the future. :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

This way is really much more accessible for me. I used a minimal bookworm image and set up soapy and the missing things I needed for my sdr.

Tinkering and making changes is so much more fun without having to wait for the whole stack!

It might be more convenient for stable station to use the official image with docker, ansible and so on, but for learning and trying things out I prefer the more barebone way.

Thanks again for the hint :slight_smile: