Working with commands

If you came to this doc you are either trying to make the interface pytests pass or you are working with commands! In both cases we will have to initialize and build the interfaces submodule that is found in backend/interfaces. As the name suggests, this folder acts as an interface between the backend and the firmware on the satellite, ensuring that all protocols used for communication between the Ground Station’s backend and satellite are the same!

Note

The pytests for interfaces run only if there is something in your backend/interfaces directory. If you don’t want them to run, make sure that directory is empty!

Pre-requisites

• You have cmake and a c-compiler installed

Getting interfaces to work

1. From your repository root, let’s initialize the submodule with the following command:

   git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Navigate to backend/interfaces from root and create a build/ directory with the following commands:

   cd backend/interfaces
   mkdir build/

3. Configure and build the interfaces with cmake in the build/ directory using the following commands:

   cd build
   cmake ..
   make -j 16

4. When you use the command ls to list out directories you should see a libobc-gs-interface.so file. This is called a Shared Object file and it contains a shared library that the ground station has python wrappers for. You can see these wrappers in the backend/interfaces/obc_gs_interface/commands/python as well in some other directories in interfaces. Anyways, now your pytests should run as intended and you can work with commands!