[1.0.4] (2015-07-04) Telemachus – Telemetry and Flight Control in the Web Browser

[Rich]

Development Continued Here.

Once the Telemachus data link part is installed...

...you can connect to a telemetry source using your web browser, to obtain several visualisations...

...and then combine them to construct your own mission control. In the image below we have an example of such a setup:

From left to right you have: Atmospheric density chart, KSP (obviously), Altitude chart, and a g-force chart on the tablet perched on the shelf. The following screen shots show more Telemachus features.

Figure 1 - Send basic commands to your vessels

Figure 2 - MechJeb2 integration

Figure 3 - Kerbal Maps integration

Download Telemachus from Curse, KerbalStuff or GitHub

For Compliance of Add-on Rule 5

In case it wasn't obvious already, Telemachus sends telemetry data from KSP to a web browser. If you require precise information on the data exchanged and the protocols used, then please check out the API Documentation.

Links

Installation Instructions

User Guide

API Documentation

Source Code

Credits

Licence (Modified BSD)

[Rich]

Given the forums imploded and my original thread has been lost, I am going to write a post about the current state of development and where this project is heading.

Firstly the latest update was a long time coming because I needed to rewrite much of Telemachus to change the way it operated under the hood. In the previous version all the code was implemented in the part proper and cycled on and off with the creation and deletion of the part. In the newest version, the server is initialised as a Mono Behaviour and stays on for the duration that the game is running. This is better for two reasons: 1 it means that you now do not need to refresh the page when you move to a new active vessel or restart a flight and 2, it paves the way for acquiring telemetry from multiple ships simultaneously.

The second major change in the latest release was the addition of flight control, which has opened up some interesting possibilities for cooperative play. Recently I conducted an "across Internet" test to determine its viability, it was working well with the game running on my computer and with the ship being controlled by the other party in a remote location (I suspect it was in fact transatlantic) until I realised that some idiot engineer had superglued the Telemachus part to the pre-circularisation stage. Therefore remote control of the vessel was lost when this stage was jettisoned.

In addition to this the right click menu has been extended to report information about the status of the data link which can be seen in the picture below.

This information includes, the data rate, the power consumption of the part (this is related to the data rate), a button to open your default web browser to the Telemachus information page, and a button to toggle the link on and off given there is a new Telemachus part made by Fusty with an animation representative of the current state.

So what is next on the agenda? Well I have now unlocked the the web server so it can serve pages written by anyone, I have so far seen some exciting stuff created by users with far more web skills than myself. I hope to see what people can come up with, and to help with this I will be focusing on extending and improving the API. Unfortunately there is no support for loading images from within the plugin (you can host them elsewhere of course).

In terms of experimental work, now that the flight control element is well underway I have plans to stream images from the MechJeb Hull Camera and plot longitude and latitude on a map backdrop. The former does have a working proof of concept, which is shown in the image below.

Edited January 5, 2014 by Rich

[Meatsauce]

Very impressive work.

interesting possibilities for cooperative play.

Please do tell us more about these possibilities and where you think this is going.

[hedzup456]

Hi there!

Just wondering if you can help me. Using your mod me and some others are doing a 'Mission Control' style thing. We've port forwarded port 8080, and have access to other ships' data. However, we occasionally lose connection; the telemetry part stops sending data (both antennae do not work). Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Hedz.

PS We do have power and we do have an internet connection.

[Rich]

Very impressive work.

Please do tell us more about these possibilities and where you think this is going.

You force one player to IVA mode and you relay instructions to him using the Telemachus data via Skype.

Hi there!

Just wondering if you can help me. Using your mod me and some others are doing a 'Mission Control' style thing. We've port forwarded port 8080, and have access to other ships' data. However, we occasionally lose connection; the telemetry part stops sending data (both antennae do not work). Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Hedz.

PS We do have power and we do have an internet connection.

This is a known bug. Unfortunately I suspect it is a concurrency issue so it is proving difficult to track down (and reproduce), in fact I am working on a potential fix for it right now.

[hedzup456]

Great, thanks for the info!

Can I slip in a little feature request? Being able to monitor resource levels would be really useful for our RLMCC.

Thanks,

Hedz

[Andellmere]

I hate to sound like an idiot, but I can't seem to access the telemachus information on another computer. Could you perhaps give instructions for connecting over the internet to someone else's information?

[macegee]

Thank you for your awesome plugin. Just tried it with my friend via internet, and it worked nicely. Would you be so kind to create a page with text data only, or at least to provide a sample page so we can make it on our own in a way we want?

Found a bug: when you start a flight, Telemachus Antenna animation shows that it's already unfolded, while it's says 'disabled'. Then you enable it, and it folds down.

[Rich]

Great, thanks for the info!

Can I slip in a little feature request? Being able to monitor resource levels would be really useful for our RLMCC.

Thanks,

Hedz

I have just release another update to the SpacePort which hopefully fixes the stability issues, fingers crossed. Don't hesitate to let me know if it still happens, this is a bug I definitely want to see the back of.

As for resource information, that is already a planned feature since it is somewhat vital for achieving the goals of this plugin

I hate to sound like an idiot, but I can't seem to access the telemachus information on another computer. Could you perhaps give instructions for connecting over the internet to someone else's information?

The instructions will depend on the router you have, but the general topic research is "port forwarding". Essentially, you will need to configure your router so that it forwards one of its external ports to the IP (and port) of the internal computer you are running KSP on.

Thank you for your awesome plugin. Just tried it with my friend via internet, and it worked nicely. Would you be so kind to create a page with text data only, or at least to provide a sample page so we can make it on our own in a way we want?

Found a bug: when you start a flight, Telemachus Antenna animation shows that it's already unfolded, while it's says 'disabled'. Then you enable it, and it folds down.

Tables of data is also a planned feature . Thanks for the bug report, it is probably a persistance issue which I havent accounted for.

For the 1.3.0.0 update, the main additions were a few more API calls, bug fixes and an improved skin based on jquery-ui.

Edited January 5, 2014 by Rich

[bandit4910]

Does this run a server on localhost or your IP?(Asking because I've been warned 2 times by my ISP to stop hosting servers.)

[Corax]

(Asking because I've been warned 2 times by my ISP to stop hosting servers.)

Time to change ISP then I guess... not much of an "internet service" they seem to provide!

Does this run a server on localhost or your IP?

Technically it does run a web server on the same machine you're running KSP on, which you may or may not forward from your router, so it may or may not be visible from the internet. 'IP' stands for 'Internet Protocol', so yes, all this is using IP, specifically TCP over IP.

[Rich]

If you specify 127.0.0.1 as the IP in the Telemachus config file then it will only listen locally. The default behaviour is to listen on all available interfaces, but as Corax mentions if you haven't forwarded any ports on your router then there should be no issue.

[macegee]

Minor bug report for version 1.3.0.0. If you press "Open Link" on your antenna, it still opens the old 127.0.0.1:8080/telemachus/information instead of new information.html. Persistence issue is fixed tho (required me to start a new save file).

Also, what do you think about Attitude display? Pitch, Roll, Yaw data. And something for space navigation, like a true anomaly. I don't know yet how to use it tho, but me and my friend will figure it out I hope.

[Rich]

Persistence issue is fixed tho (required me to start a new save file).

Cool, I was having difficulty reproducing this, that's not to say there isn't still a problem somewhere

Minor bug report for version 1.3.0.0. If you press "Open Link" on your antenna, it still opens the old 127.0.0.1:8080/telemachus/information instead of new information.html.

Hmm, the old information page doesn't even exist anymore so that old address should redirect to the new information page. Maybe the page was cached, either way I should update it to directly open information.html

Also, what do you think about Attitude display? Pitch, Roll, Yaw data. And something for space navigation, like a true anomaly. I don't know yet how to use it tho, but me and my friend will figure it out I hope.

I think an attitude display is another vital feature which is currently missing, it will be done eventually. I have not come across true anomaly before, but I will check it out.

[Camacha]

I seem to have a little trouble reading data when hovering my mouse cursor over the plot line. The corresponding data shows, but due to the short time it shows it is very hard to read, quite impossible actually. Am I doing something wrong?

[alextehnurd]

Whenever I press Open Link on the antenna it does nothing. Upon further inspection at the debug menu it gave me an "ArgumentOutOfRangeException" with "Index" on the following line.

[Rich]

I seem to have a little trouble reading data when hovering my mouse cursor over the plot line. The corresponding data shows, but due to the short time it shows it is very hard to read, quite impossible actually. Am I doing something wrong?

This is a problem with Telemachus in the way that I am drawing the graphs, I have not yet found a fix for this.

Whenever I press Open Link on the antenna it does nothing. Upon further inspection at the debug menu it gave me an "ArgumentOutOfRangeException" with "Index" on the following line.

This means the plugin has failed to listen on any of your network interfaces. If you know what the IP of the interface is and the port you wish to listen on is, then you can put them into the Telemachus config file manually.

[Rich]

Another experimental feature - integration of Telemachus with the data from Kerbal Maps. Currently, it only shows the active vessel but it would be an easy enough extension to show all vessels in Kerbin's SOI.

Edited January 5, 2014 by Rich

[Camacha]

Another experimental feature - integration of Telemachus with the data from Kerbal Maps. Currently, it only shows the active vessel but it would be an easy enough extension to show all vessels in Kerbin's SOI.

Will there be any penalty or requirement to get a position, having to build a GPS network or triangulation stations? Or do you get it for free?

[Elios]

Will there be any penalty or requirement to get a position, having to build a GPS network or triangulation stations? Or do you get it for free?

no need for GPS NASA could track missions just fine be for GPS

when you know the inclination and speed of an object + having a data link getting a fix is pretty trivial

[Rich]

Will there be any penalty or requirement to get a position, having to build a GPS network or triangulation stations? Or do you get it for free?

There will be no penalty or requirement as this is outside the scope of this mod.

[GodFear]

anyway to interface more with mechjeb? Have a dedicated Mechjeb page?

what about a remote map? ability to plan moves? burns? need more ability to easily plan...

Awesome job this could be a lot of fun! Keep it up!

[KWall24]

I'm running this mod on my laptop, connected to my network via wi-fi, and I'm trying to access the information via my iPhone, which is connected via wi-fi. But they don't seem to want to talk to each other on the default port 8080. I changed the config to use my laptop IP(it's in my DHCP reservations) but it doesn't seem to work. It works when accessing locally from my laptop though. Any ideas?

Edited April 25, 2013 by KWall24

[Rich]

anyway to interface more with mechjeb? Have a dedicated Mechjeb page?

what about a remote map? ability to plan moves? burns? need more ability to easily plan...

Awesome job this could be a lot of fun! Keep it up!

More MechJeb integration is planned when version 2 (MechJeb) is fully released, that and I do want to add more information such that you can fly your entire mission locked in IVA.

I'm running this mod on my laptop, connected to my network via wi-fi, and I'm trying to access the information via my iPhone, which is connected via wi-fi. But they don't seem to want to talk to each other on the default port 8080. I changed the config to use my laptop IP(it's in my DHCP reservations) but it doesn't seem to work. It works when accessing locally from my laptop though. Any ideas?

From the limited testing I have done on iOS devices I do remember that Safari did not like 8080 (or anything other than port 80 for that matter). I would advise instructing Telemachus to listen on port 80 via the configuration file then attempting to connect from your iPhone without specifying a port. I would be interested to know if the graphs actually work on the iPhone, however the remote control pages should operate as they are much simpler. If that does not work, try connecting to the visualisations not through the landing page, as iOS Safari is extremely picky about HTML errors, in fact ... I will run all the Telemachus pages through a validator tonight.

Edited April 25, 2013 by Rich

[bulletrhli]

You were talking about using your iPhone to connect to the local webpage, I tried both using WAMP and Port forwarding to make sure and my iPhone says the server is not responding for the page.