UniClOGS Static Configuration Management

Poster Image
Bryan Borgeson OrION Internship Poster
Poster Session
A
Poster Number
08
Project Author(s)
Bryan Borgeson
Institution
Portland Community College
Project Description

UniClOGS (University-Class Open Ground Station) is an open-source project enabling communication with CubeSats via amateur band radio, employing the use of rotatable antennas, software-defined radio, and other hardware controlled by Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers (SBCs). Developed and maintained by the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), the existing system presented challenges in version control, as well as software setup and configuration, often proving time-consuming for users interested in setting up their own ground station instances. This internship project addressed this issue by streamlining the process of packaging, downloading, and configuring the UniClOGS system software. We developed a single Linux image asset that bundles all required software, significantly reducing the configuration burden for users. Leveraging rpi-image-gen, a tool built and maintained by the developers of Raspberry Pi, we can now define our image asset configuration as code. This approach facilitates easy change tracking and provides a foundation for future automated build and distribution pipelines, further enhancing the resilience, reliability, and accessibility of UniClOGS for the open-source community. Additionally, we examined the software development toolchain, identifying opportunities to improve the maintainability and governance of UniClOGS's open-source applications. This examination led us to introduce automated unit testing, code linting, and type-checking that is run on every push to the version control system.