Setting up Your Work Environment
0. Download Git
Git is the version control tool we use for avionics code. You can download Git by following the link below and selecting your platform.
(Optional) If you don't have much experience working with git or version control, it might be useful to install Git Extensions, a graphical user interface for git.
http://gitextensions.github.io/
For Pyxida Firmware
1. Download PlatformIO
PlatformIO is a multi platform build system for software work on embedded and development platforms. The PlatformIO IDE is available as a plugin for either VS Code or Atom. You can use another text editor for working on the software, but it will be easiest to compile Pyxida software using the PlatformIO IDE. Download and install either the PlatformIO IDE for VS Code or Atom by using the link below and scrolling down:
https://platformio.org/platformio-ide
For the Pyxida ground station
Currently, we use Python 3.4 and PySide (A port of Qt for Python) for the ground station. However, we are considering moving to PyQt, which would allow us to use Python 3.5+.
1. Download Python 3.4
The current ground station uses python 3.4. If you have another version of python installed, you will want to uninstall it before installing 3.4 to avoid future
conflicts. If you need differnt versions of python. I would recomend looking into python "virtual environments" (one tutorial can be found in the second half of
this article http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/). Here is the link for python 3.4
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-344/
2. Download pyside and pyserial
These are additional software packages you need for developing for the ground station. You can get them by running the following commands in the command line/terminal:
pip install PySerial
pip install pyside
For working on Pyxida Hardware (the board itself)
1. Download Eagle CAD
This is the CAD program we are using to design Pyxida itself.
https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/overview
Cloning Rocket Team Code to Your Computer
In order to be able to clone the code from the Rocket Team repository onto your computer, we are going to set up an SSH key on your computer and on your MIT
github account for authentication. If you can, follow this guide closely in order to set up the SSH key on you computer and on github. Note: when the tutorial
asks you to go to github and log the public key for your SSH authentication, you should go to github.mit.edu, go to the settings for your account, and click on
the "SSH and PGP keys" section. It should be obvious what to do from there. Here is the link to the tutorial (you will have to click the link at the bottom of
the first page of the tutorial in order to continue to the second part)
https://help.github.com/articles/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent/
Once you have done this, go to github.mit.edu/rocket-team and click on the repository you want to copy onto your computer ("Pyxida" for example). Click on the
"clone or download" drop down menu, select "use SSH" and copy the link it provides. Then open "git bash" (which should have been installed when you got git)
in the directory that you want to download your local copy to. Execute the comand "git clone link" where link is the link you copied from the repository (also don't
include the quotes). Now you have your own local copy of the code to look at.