slonk: a new engine controller software

Motivation

The previous RESFET controller software kind of sucks. It's a whole load of spaghetti code. The goal for this project is to rewrite the controller to make it more configurable, easier to extend to support multiple engines, and generally just less of a pain to work with.

API

slonk also includes a redesign for the API for communcations between the dashboard and controller. For further details, refer to api.md.

This documnent also explains the structure of configuration files.

Installation and dependencies

slonk is written in Rust, and uses Cargo, the main Rust build system, to build and test. We recommend using rustup to set up the Rust build environment.

Building

To build the release version of the code, navigate to the root directory of this repository and enter cargo build --release. To run the controller, run ./target/release/slonk after building.

slonk must be run as root (via sudo) in order to take ownership of GPIO.

The controller executable takes two arguments:

1. A path to the configuration JSON file.
2. A path to the directory where logs will be stored.

For example, the following command would run the engine controller for the Titan motor configuration and store logs in ../slogs/my_test_logs.

cargo build --release
sudo ./target/release/slonk config/titan.json ../slogs/my_test_logs

To run all tests, run cargo test.

Test binary

The main slonk binary can only be run as root on a Raspberry Pi. To make testing easier, we also provide a test binary that can be run as a non-privileged user on any Linux computer. To run it, first build with cargo build --release and then run ./target/release/dummy. It takes the same arguments as the main controller executable.

cargo build --release
sudo .target/release/dummy config/titan.json ../slogs/my_dummy_slogs

Standard Git Procedures

To reduce chances of version control blunders, we've created standard git procedures. Refer to git_procedures.md for more details.