Saturday, February 9, 2008

Telemetry, wildcards and new strings

This morning I installed APRS telemetry support on the production server. Some APRS stations use the telemetry protocol to transmit things like temperature (inside, or measured from the heat sink of a transmitter), battery voltage, or number of transmissions by a digipeater. Some also send states of switches or relays. For example, take a look at the telemetry data transmitted by the digipeater VK5RAC-1, or the DIGI_NED digipeater PI1APA.

I've also implemented wildcard searching in the weather and telemetry views. Should help you in finding weather and telemetry-enabled stations in your area.

These features added some strings which need to be translated. I also did some changes in the weather and info page strings, making it possible to translate some more of them, and to make more proper translations for some languages (more complete sentences translated). I'll continue this task later.

I also installed the new server in a co-location site a couple days ago, and I've been testing it under high load and benchmarking different disk and database configurations. Going to take it into use this weekend, I hope!

5 comments:

Tregonsee said...

Is there a place where I can find out, exactly, how to get the equation values loaded into the APRS system so that telemetry appears as practical units? The VK5RAC-1 TLM page is what I am trying to do. I have the equations, and the format, but not how you "upload" them.

Hessu said...

Currently you need to transmit the equations over the air on the APRS frequency, as described in the APRS specification (the EQNS/UNIT/PARM packets). The details on how to do this depend on the hardware & software being used - each has it's own commands to do this.

If you can send these packets, they will go to findu & aprs.fi and all the other sites, and there won't be any need to tell them to each site separately.

Unknown said...

I know this is an old thread, but I just set mine up. Strictly speaking, you don't need to transmit them over the air, you need to inject them into the APRS-IS network. I wrote a perl script that sends the three messages directly to the APRS-IS network. If anyone is interested, I'll post it.

FastVoteFred said...

WB7ODYFred,
Says I am setting up for a High altitude Balloon flight, and would like to use your perl script, if you can post it here, to inject the (the EQNS/UNIT/PARM packets) to the APRS-IS network? Yes I know this is two years later, but am interested in what you have. I am learning about APRS Telemetry.

Oregon High Altitude Balloon Launch September 2012
Fred Finster

FastVoteFred said...

Yes, 2 years later post your perl script please. Or if someone else is real sharp with pearl, post a replacement script to upload these parameters to the APRS-IS network.

One can always ask for help.
Thanks,
Fred Finster
Oregon High Altitude Balloon Sept 2012 Launch.