Human Digital Control Station [HDCS]

HDCS is a command, control, and instrumentation interface.

Designed initially for use with testing small hybrid rockets, it can be expanded or reduced to fit the needs of many other instrumentation and control applications.

Check out the video demo at this link!

To run, clone the git repository on your local machine, then in a command line :

python __HDCS__.py

You may find you are missing the dependencies:

• Python 3.6.2+
• PyQt5
  • pyqtgraph
  • numpy
• Installed fonts found in /fonts folder

Architecture

This code is intimately intertwined with a number of other systems, chief of which is ADCS. The ADCS code can be found here.

Ultimately, the micro-controllers (far right of diagram) take the majority of the data in, and actuate the commands.

Note: One can definitely separate each module of HDCS from the ADCS / Micro grand scheme. Modules each continue to be written to be as portable as possible.

UI Design & Automatic Refactoring Features

The (Qt Creator) program is used to add features to the GUI, and also to signal to the program which variables should be shown on screen - in "displays" - and which should not.

A key finding in the creation of HDCS is that updating Qt Stylesheets to reflect the state of a variable (in limits, or out of limits), is seriously too slow for the scale of QLabels on-screen. Because of this, we refactor the GUI on each startup.

UI refactoring refers to the conversion of all the QLabels which are automatically identified as "color-able" (see definitions below), into highly efficient QGraphicsItems.

In addition to the performance improvements, this also allows us to drag and drop any displays as we wish.

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Creation of a new instrumentation variable into the interface

1. Open the MainWindow GUI file (mainwindow.ui) found in the "design_files" folder. Note that this is a Qt Creator / Qt Designer file, so get that program first to edit it.

2. Add the new display window as a QLabel object

3. Change the ObjectName to exactly the same as the "key" it will have in the state variable dictionary, for example: 'countdown_time'

4. Pick which display style you would like to have

   • Color-State Display "csd" (color text to reflect if in or out of limits)

     • csd0 : do not display numeric state in text
     • csd1 : display numeric state in text

   • Background-color-State Display "bsd" (color background to reflect if in or out of limits)

     • bsd0 : do not display numeric state in text
     • bsd1 : display numeric state in text

5. Save the file and convert to .py with the Qt -> PyQt utility (see .bat files in design_files folder)

6. Add the instrumentation variable to Definitions.State as a new key, value pair in the dictionary.

7. Add the instrumentation's safe limits in State_Limits if needed

8. Add the key to the Definitions.Control_Keys variable (if the key is not instrumentation)