The ground station software for the Battle of the Rockets competition
This software runs on a Raspberry Pi and communicates with the payload. It commands it to start actions using physical buttons, and recieves images which are displayed on the screen.
Because the raspberry pi runs an arm chip, the version qt creator compiles on your computer doesn't work. There is a way to cross compile, but thats complicated and this program is quite simple, so I wanted to just compile it on the pi itself. To do this, first make sure the following is installed on the pi:
sudo apt-get install qt5-default
sudo apt-get install qtcreator
Once those are installed, it can be compiled and run using the following commands:
make
qmake
./GroundStation
Note that in order to start it (and just it, no DE) when there is no x server running, use the startx command:
startx ./GroundStation -- -nocursor
Quick rant: I found basically no documentation on using startx to run a single program. This proved frustrating cause basically nowhere was -nocursor mentioned. Turns out that -- is used to separate the arguments form the program and startx. So all the arguments for ./GroundStation go before -- and all the arguments for startx go after --. It doesn't work if you put -nocursor before ./GroundStation, which doesn't make any sense, but oh well. And I also don't like that -nocursor only has one dash and not two. <\endrant>
To start the program after booting into a tty, the following line can be put into the default user's .bashrc (with whatever the path to the GroundStation executable is):
startx ./rocket-ground-station/GroundStation -- -nocursor