FIX Gateway

Copyright (c) 2014 Phil Birkelbach

FIX stands for Flight Information eXchange. It is a set of specifications, protocols and documentation for use in exchanging flight related information easily and reliably.

Fix Gateway is a program that abstracts this flight information and allows communication between different technologies.

The primary use is as the interface to the pyEfis electronic flight information project. It can also be used to interface flight simulator software to 'real' hardware such as instrumentation or custom flight controls.

Installation

Begin by cloning the Git repository

git clone [email protected]:makerplane/FIX-Gateway.git fixgw

or

git clone https://github.com/makerplane/FIX-Gateway.git fixgw

It is recommende that you work in a virtual environment. To use the global interpreter, skip the below step.

$ make venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

The second command, the activation of the virtual environment, needs to be performed every time you start a new console session.

Next, you install all dependencies.

$ make init

Then run one of the two helper scripts.

server:

$ ./fixGw.py

client:

$ ./fixGwClient.py

client with GUI interface:

$ ./fixGwClient.py --gui

Configuration

The configuration files are in the src/fixgw/config directory.

Upon excution the configuration files will be copied into:

~/makerplane/fixgw/config

When fixgateway copies the files it will set the timestamp on them to 'Feb 3 1981'

If the timestamp on the file is changed, because it has been edited, the file will not be overwritten, instead a file of the same name with '.dist' added to the end will be created.

The goal is to automatically update default configurations with important changes or bug fixes.

If you would like to benefit from fixes and new features without having to figure out the new options

then only edit thse files:

config/preferences.yaml.custom
config/database/custom.yaml

If you wanted to edit database.yaml you can make a copy of it

Then edit config/preferences.yaml.custom and under includes: section add:

includes:
  DATABASE_CONFIG: my-custom-filename-database.yaml

Most configuration files can be changed in the same manner, 'config/preferences.yaml' contains most of the info you should need, simply copy/paste from 'config/preferences.yaml' into 'config/preferences.yaml.custom' and then make the desired change.

The file 'config/database/custom.yaml' will overwrite any default database settings, so if you just need to add custom fixids or alter alert thresholds and timeouts, make your changes there.

The final goal with configuration is to allow you to make any change you want while also making it simple to change just a few options using only config/preferences.yaml.custom

Currently we are missing the ability to easily change a single option in some files

Testing

To run all of the automated tests and code covreage.

$ make test

Please create tests for your changes and ensure all tests pass before submitting a pull request

Cleanup

To remove the virtual environment and test output

$ make clean

Distribution

To create a Python wheel for distribution, there is a make target. The wheel will be created in the dist/ directory.

$ make wheel

After installing the wheel via pip, the user can run Fix-Gateway from the command line.

server:

$ fixgw

client:

$ fixgwc

client with GUI:

$ fixgwc --gui

Snapcraft Development

To install snapd see: https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd To install snapcraft see: https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapcraft

To build the snap locally:

$ snapcraft

To install the snap locally:

$ sudo snap install fixgateway_2.1.1_amd64.snap --dangerous

Dangerous is needed because locally built snaps are not signed

Requirements

The only dependencies for FIX Gateway are Python itself and pyyaml. If you used pip3 to install FIX Gateway the dependencies should have been installed automatically. FIX Gateway requires Python 3.6 and should run on versions of Python higher than 3.6.

Many of the plugins will require other dependencies. See the individual plugin documentation for information about those. We'll discuss some of the more common ones.

Under Ubuntu distibutions socketcan can be installed with: apt install can-utils Some background on linux can can be found here: https://elinux.org/Bringing_CAN_interface_up To bring up the vcan0 interface: ` $ modprobe vcan $ sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan $ sudo ip link set up vcan0 `

You will also need PyQt6 installed. Consult the PyQt documentation on how to install PyQt on your system. Typically it is

sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt6

The canfix plugin will require both the python-can package as well as the python-canfix package. Installing the python-canfix package with pip3 should install both.

sudo pip3 install python-canfix