Virtual Flight Deck for UAVs

Web interface simulating a cockpit of an unmanned aerial vehicle, built with Akka, Play and ScalaJS.

This project is made of several subprojects:

• vfd-main contains the play application that serves the actual interface
• vfd-dashboard dynamic cockpit interface built with scalajs that displays real-time data from the drone
• vfd-index dynamic landing page advertising available drones
• vfd-uav communication backend for message exchange with drones

Run

SBT is used as the build tool. To get started:

1. start sbt in the base directory
2. enter 'run'
   Note: if this is the first time your run a play project through sbt, be aware that you may need to wait a while as your computer downloads half the internet
3. open localhost:9000 in a modern browser to see the application in action
4. make some changes
5. go to step 3 (the application is automatically recompiled)

The application can be deployed as a standalone package by running the 'dist' task.

Developer Overview

The general idea of this project is to create a web interface for displaying live data from a drone.

The flow of such data can be summarized in a few points:

• Data is received and processed in the form of MAVLink messages.
• Messages arrive at a communication backend (implemented in vfd-uav). Currently, this is either a mock backend that generates random messages, or a serial connection using flow for low-level communication.
• These messages are then transferred through vfd-main to the interface via websockets.
• Messages are parsed by the front-end (the interface) and used to display virtual instrumentation.
• Currently, a custom set of MAVLink messages are used. Their definition is in mavlink/concise.xml
• The dialect definition is translated from xml into useable scala code by a plugin during the build.

Details on the dashboard interface:

• the frontend is a pure scalajs application using scalatags templating
• basically, vfd-main provides a websocket for communication and serves a page (see views.uav.scala.html) that contains a div with a loading message
• once loaded, the scalajs frontend replaces the content of said div with its insrumentation (see code in package vfd.dashboard.ui.*)
• messages are received by a websocket and stored in an observable "var"; this process uses scala.rx
• panels observe the recieved messages and update their respective instruments and components

License

Copyright (C) Jakob Odersky

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.