SavinaRoja

Made a demo for 0.1.2 wherein I send a spaceplane into orbit using telemetry and the new SmartASS commands. A bit longer than my other videos at ~4 minutes, any and all feedback is appreciated. wwRjXRsmRN0xUCKko

Although I silently added support for the Telemachus FlyByWire system via the "fbw" command a short while ago, controlling your craft in Kerminal has been very deficient (FlyByWire is not really suited for use as a command-line interface, so I'll have to whip up a nice Widget to really take advantage of that). This situation is greatly improved as the 0.1.2 version introduces the "sa" command for using the MechJeb SmartASS commands available in Telemachus. This is what you will see if you type "help sa" into the Kerminal Command Line: sa Utilize MechJeb SmartASS to lock orientation vector. Disable with the "off" subcommand. Usage: sa (off | node | prograde | retrograde | normalplus | normalminus | radialplus | radialminus | targetplus | targetminus | relativeplus | relativeminus | parallelplus | parallelminus) sa surface <heading> <pitch> <roll> Standard Commands (no target required): off Disable SmartASS. node Orient along next node. prograde Orient along orbital velocity prograde. retrograde Orient along orbital velocity retrograde. normalplus Orient along orbital velocity normal plus. normalminus Orient along orbital velocity normal minus. radialplus Orient along the orbital velocity radial plus. radialminus Orient along the orbital velocity radial minus. surface <heading> <pitch> <roll> Set orientation based on surface angles. Targeted Commands (target required): targetplus Orient towards the target. targetminus Orient away from the target. relativeplus Orient along relative velocity. relativeminus Orient against relative velocity. parallelplus Orient along parallel velocity component. parallelminus Orient against parallel velocity component. Comments: When in a prograde orbit, "normalplus" corresponds to "up"/"north" while "normalminus" corresponds to "down"/"south". This is reversed in a retrograde orbit. Conversely, "radialplus" will correspond to "away from orbited body" in both prograde and retrograde orbits and "radialminus" will correspond to "towards orbited body". Targeted Commands will not work unless there is a target selected. Selecting a target with Telemachus is unfortunately impossible at this time and must be done manually in KSP. In the future, Kerminal may warn about the use of these commands while nothing is targeted. This update also introduces proof-of-concept for a system of enabling per-command callbacks, in which Kerminal expects a response from Telemachus to inform it whether the command was un/successful. This is especially useful here to inform the user if there is a MechJeb part available on the craft, and may be applied generally to many commands to know if they failed (due to one of: game paused, no electric charge, antenna inactive, antenna out of reach). Edited to add: Thanks for the helpful discussion in IRC, especially suggestions and tips from Red5, Mjolnir, GreeningGalaxy, and others.

This is an overview guide to install and use Kerminal in Windows: If you don't already have Python 3.4, download and install it from here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-342/ Download and install the unofficial curses binary library for Python 3.4 from here: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#curses Download the npyscreen2 source code from GitHub and unzip: https://github.com/SavinaRoja/npyscreen2/archive/master.zip Download the Kerminal source code from GitHub and unzip: https://github.com/SavinaRoja/Kerminal/archive/master.zip Open the command prompt (cmd.exe) and install both the npsycreen2 and Kerminal packages by executing their setup.py files with a command like "C:\Python34\python.exe setup.py install" A script called "kerminal" will then be put in C:\Python34\Scripts which one will execute with C:\Python34\python.exe ("C:\Python34\python.exe kerminal") from the command prompt. This will start the Kerminal.

Rich put up a list of some alternative (to the standard browser-based one) Telemachus interfaces on the GitHub wiki for Telemachus, which are all really cool and definitely worth checking out if you have not seen them. I love the creativity people have shown, and I definitely draw inspiration from the work of others as I am putting Kerminal together. I wanted to call attention to a few other projects I've encountered along the way which are not (at least currently) listed on the link above. Compilation thread for custom controller hardware : Not directly relevant to Telemachus for many, but highly interesting to see how people create control and interface systems. Control Panel by KK4TEE : Special mention for integrating custom hardware with Telemachus RemoteView (terminated) by Deedo : Hybrid graphic and text interface to show orbits through Telemachus. Screenshot of interface TeleKerbin (hiatus?) by eyecikjou567 : C# terminal interface native to Windows Flight Overview(?) project by mjukis (and others?) : I enjoy their curated, info-dense interface system, though I went for dynamic over static (pros and cons for each). Nausicaa by fixermark : An interface for Google Glass. I am in no position to try it myself, but it's intriguing

Not much time I'm afraid to compose a lengthy post, but I wanted to note that I've increased the version of Kerminal in honor of the addition of gauges in the Resources field. The Resources element will dynamically resize itself and show/hide resources according to whether or not your vehicle has any capacity for that resource type. Because this is something I appear to be doing now, here's a new demo video:

This has been a long time in the making, but the time was not spent idle. I was hitting some limitations with npyscreen that were preventing me from providing some of the features that I wanted most. So I decided to rebuild it (mostly) from scratch and thus npyscreen2 was born. As a new library it is a bit sparse in terms of features but it gives me significantly more flexibility and safety in development, Kerminal's design should benefit greatly. Enough gabbing about that, let's talk about what is new in Kerminal. I made a quick demo video of Kerminal in action, you may watch it here (text might be a little blurry unless in HD): Kerminal now has a dynamically resizing telemetry window that will try to pack the displayed widgets into the available space. The current packing algorithm isn't too elaborate, I'll probably implement something a bit more powerful in the future. The whole interface in general is built to be safely resizable (one of the strengths of npyscreen2), so this is a major break from other statically sized interfaces. In the future I'd like for users to be able to dynamically modify/create/save special telemetry loadouts rather than have a static interface. When executing a command which yields text output, e.g. "help", Kerminal goes into a text display mode in which you can scroll (arrow-up/arrow-down/page-up/page-down) if the text is too long to be seen all at once. In the future there may also be an editable text mode so that Kerminal may be used as a basic text editor (think scripts and automation). Of course, loading text files produced in other text editors will definitely be available. Partial coverage of the Telemachus API allows the use of this Kerminal version for some basic telemetry, but does not make it easy to send commands to KSP. That's also on the future work agenda. Feel free to ask any questions or make suggestions for improvements. Once again I'll note that the source for Kerminal is located here on GitHub: https://github.com/SavinaRoja/Kerminal and you may feel free to open issues there as well as post here in the forums. Also, Kerminal requires Python 3.4.0 or greater, you won't be able to install it or use it with a lesser version. Because npyscreen2 is not yet up on PyPI (and is thus not pip-able), you will need to manually download and install a copy of npyscreen2 from it's source on GitHub here:https://github.com/SavinaRoja/npyscreen2 For those unfamiliar with installing python applications at this level, I have found this to be a pretty good and thorough guide.

I am just now seeing this fascinating project before I have to go to sleep! It might be a contender for Kerminal integration. I expect I'll be reading into this more tomorrow.

I am using the websocket API. There's some prior work out there that uses http requests, but the websocket approach seems more straightforward for a non-browser application.

Here are some of my thoughts about where I will go with this in the near future: Refactoring of the command interface and its interaction with the UI. Implement automated control of Telemachus subscriptions; nobody should have to do this. You should only get the data you ask for from logging or from widgets in the data frame. Now that I have a nice summary of the kinds of data which are relevant to ascents(/descents?) I shall work on creating a telemetry interface "page" for ascents; this will help establish a more mature widget interface in the data frame. I would like to create a demo of a text file editor embedded in Kerminal, so that one could read/write/edit/manage kOS scripts. I would really like to somehow forge a collaboration between Kerminal, Telemachus, and kOS so that you could upload and activate kOS remotely.

Good news everyone! As of this morning before work I got the data logging facilities for Kerminal in place (mostly), and collected some data as a demonstration. I'll go ahead and talk about the data before walking you through how I collected the data in case you would like to try. For the inaugural data logging test I recorded telemetry from the ascent of a probe at the KSC to an 80km equatorial orbit around Kerbin. The data was set to record at 5 Hz (0.2 second intervals) and saved as a CSV (with a semicolon as the separating character). I logged everything I possibly could using Telemachus from just before liftoff to when I reached orbit about 4.5 minutes later. The data file was 1.4M. You can get a copy of the data here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6424897/ascent0-kerminal.csv I also shared a Google Docs version of it on IRC a little while ago and some people contributed some nice charts, feel free to do the same: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18Y2vN1gf7oPoBhTvRO_AHSQOuOGOuozFisVOp3UpRgw/edit?usp=sharing Here begins the instructions: I first want to say that while I am very happy that Kerminal can finally DO something, it is hella unfinished and unless you follow closely, it might not work. I unfortunately can't take any pictures of the interface right now as I am aware from my normal computer, but words should suffice. Start by connecting to your Telemachus server using "connect <your-address> <your-port>". Because I was connecting to a computer on my local network, for me this happened to be "connect 192.168.1.4 8085". Once you have verified that your connection is made, you can show the logging status using "log status". Since you have just started your connection and haven't turned logging on, it should show that logging is inactive and that you are only logging "t.universalTime", "v.missionTime", and "sys.time". The order in which these read is also the order in which they will appear in your log. At this point, I set the Telemachus communication rate to 5Hz by the following "send {"rate":200}" (use or modify as desired). To enable the logging of everything enter the following two commands: "log all", "sub --all". Eventually, the user will never have to worry about managing the background detail of Telemachus subscriptions, but you do for now... If you would like to change the name of the log file, you are free to do so with "log file <desired-filename>", otherwise the default will be "kerminaldata.csv". Enable the logging with "log on" and disable it when you are done with "log off". Since I was starting logging just before lift off I used the following command to stage (and thus initiate ascent) right after the logging was enabled: "log on; send{"run":["f.stage"]}" That's it for now, let me know if you have any ideas, questions, bugs to report.

That is a great suggestion. I am glad to see the progress that project has made. I'll look into it!

Hello all, I have been playing KSP in my spare time for quite some time now (though I don't really have that much time as a grad student). I have an affinity for math and programming so I have begun combining those interests to create Kerminal: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93469-WIP-Kerminal-Terminal-Interface-to-KSP-via-Telemachus Hopefully I'll be able to give some back to the KSP Community which has already given me so much fun. Happy Kerballing.

After some furious hacking, I have renovated the interface and bumped the version to 0.0.2! The skeleton of the interface I currently envision is now partly in place. I'll try not to bore you with too much development details, instead I will describe what's new in the interface and a screenshot-assisted walkthrough. The interface now has a "Kerminal Command Line" at the bottom, while the rest of the screen is consumed by the data field. Once you enter Kerminal, your user-input will either be sent to whatever is currently active in the data field or to the Kerminal Command Line; to move between the data field and the Kerminal Command Line you push TAB. This will allow users to interact with the data field's widgets to control the interface and the application underneath as well via commands. Let's go ahead and move on to an introduction of the interface. So if you've installed Kerminal correctly, you should be able to launch it by typing "kerminal" into your preferred terminal emulator. You should see a screen that looks something like this: Here you can see the Kerminal Command Line down at the bottom, and the System Time up at the top should be live updating. So now I'm going to go ahead and connect to my server. I'll do this by first pushing TAB so that I can type my command, then type the command "connect <address>:<port>", shown below: As you can see I redacted the address of my server for safey reasons! If you are running KSP on the same computer as Kerminal, the address should be "localhost". The default port for Telemachus is 8085, but change it if your configuration is different. After successfully connecting you should see the status bar at the top include the name of the Vessel currently transmitting for Telemachus like so: So now that I have connected to Telemachus, let's see what commands Kerminal currently has to offer by entering the command "help". You should see this: Since my window for Kerminal is too small to see the entire message, I push TAB and started moving down the page by pushing the DOWN ARROW. Once I scroll down to "- more -" the Kerminal window displays: So now we know the commands that are currently available in Kerminal, they are (in alphabetical order): "demo", "disconnect", "help", "sub", "unsub", and "quit". We also know how they should used based on their descriptions, excellent. As you can see in the above image, I have entered "demo" into the Kerminal Command Line to see what I have currently coded as a way of demonstrating live updates in the data field; I push ENTER and see this: It doesn't look beautiful by any means, but it's good enough for tonight and I'd like to go home and relax. I've learned a lot about how I can develop the interface on top of my ncurses library (the very wonderful npyscreen) and think I'm in good shape for refactoring and moving ahead. Finally you can see that I typed "quit" into the Kerminal Command Line which will close the program. I could have also used "disconnect" if I were planning on "connect"ing to another server. As always, I welcome absolutely any feedback and am happy to help provide some technical advice to those that need it (I need testers!). Discussion is also welcome on GitHub. Pro-tip for the python and tech savvy who might want to tinker with the source: Take advantage of logging with "kerminal -l <level>"! Put in your logging statements wherever you like; run "tail -f kerminal.log". Print statements are not useful when the screen is being used by the interface (logging is better anyway) and some exceptions may be swallowed so this is really the only good way to monitor the program as it runs.

Introducing Kerminal: an open-source terminal interface to Kerbal Space Program (data tansmitted via Telemachus). EDIT: Latest Demo wwRjXRsmRN0xUCKkoThis is a stand-alone program that acts as a client to Telemachus in order to live-stream data to your terminal. I've been working on the underlying technical aspects for a little while now and am pleased to say that the current code represents a working demo! Get the latest source here: https://github.com/SavinaRoja/Kerminal The current demo UI looks absolutely atrocious (I'll put up a screenshot of it's current form); I haven't invested much at all in the UI design except for what I needed to prove the concept within my frameworks. So if the KSP community has any opinions on what they would like out of a terminal user interface, now is a great time for me to hear about it as I enter the planning stages of the UI. Think about all the great terminal program interfaces you've ever used, mutt, pine, irssi, vim, nano, etc., and tell me what you might envision for flying by telemetry! One feature I am excited to add shortly is the ability to log the telemetry data to file at intervals as short as the KSP physics time-delta. This will enable a bunch of fun scientific data collection and processing; perhaps in the future Kerminal will even have (optional) integration with matplotlib, pandas, and other tools for data visualization and analysis. Since Kerminal relies on the Telemachus server and API, some limitations may be imposed over which I have no direct control, however a lot of stuff can be solved with good math. I encourage people to try it out and I am happy to openly discuss any part of the project. Some technical details: Supports: Linux (of course), Mac (might need Xcode, not sure), Windows (with cygwin and some patience) Requires: Python v3.4; Python libraries: npyscreen, autobahn, docopt; KSP Mods: Telemachus (optional, MechJeb for SmartASS integration) No PyPI yet, just download the source and install to system or virtualenv. It will install a script "kerminal" so that you can start it with the command: kerminal see kerminal --help for the program's options and arguments. License: GNU GPL v3 Source: https://github.com/SavinaRoja/Kerminal