Initial setup of fprime-gds to work with OpenMCT

[mohitsingh999]

Originating Project/Creator	Mohit Singh
Affected Component
Affected Architectures(s)	F-Prime GDS
Related Issue(s)
Has Unit Tests (y/n)
Builds Without Errors (y/n)
Unit Tests Pass (y/n)
Documentation Included (y/n)	y

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Change Description

Add functionality to run OpenMCT from the F-Prime GDS. A user can specify the openmct argument at command line by running fprime-gds --openmct , and they will get two tabs; one that launches the standard GDS, and one that launches an OpenMCT server with all the telemetry channels registered and showing Real Time Telemetry.

Rationale

The current F-Prime GDS has two ways of visualizing telemetry. Channels and Charts. These telemetry visualizations can be expanded upon by integrating OpenMCT with F-Prime. OpenMCT allows for users to create dashboards, utilize gauges, stacked/overlay plots, and tables. It also incorporates conditional coloring based on user defined limits.

Testing/Review Recommendations

Currently this functionality has been fully tested with the base Ref deployment. It should be tested with additional deployments to ensure no critical values are hardcoded, since that would hinder general usability.

NOTE: This pull request is breaking. Users will need to install the fprime_openmct python package repo since that is imported at the start of run_deployment.py. That package is available at https://github.com/mohitsingh999/fprime-openmct currently and can be registered as a python package by running pip install . at the root of fprime-openmct. A pull request has been created to merge this repo into https://github.com/fprime-community/fprime-openmct, and is currently being reviewed.

Future Work

Work needs to be done to ensure the OpenMCT integration with fprime-gds happens in parallel with integration of fprime-openmct in fprime-community. General installation instructions will need to be updated to inform users to install fprime_openmct with pip, in addition to fprime_tools and fprime_gds. fprime-openmct needs to be registered on PyPI as well, just like fprime-gds and fprime-tools.

@jwest115 will be taking over managing OpenMCT integration related tasks after August 10th

[SMorettini]

I'm interested in this feature, what's the state of the pull request?

[SMorettini]

I just tested this feature. I like it, is there something I can do to help merge this pull request?

[thomas-bc]

@SMorettini we are working on the addition of a plugin architecture to the GDS (nasa/fprime#2268) and we would like the OpenMCT integration to be using it. I believe we decided to hold off on this PR until then. Copying @LeStarch for sanity check and because he's going to be the one doing the plugin architecture.

[thomas-bc]

Plugin PR was just merged! #164

We have a plugin system - some work is probably needed to incorporate this into it.

[LeStarch]

In order for this to work, we need the "start-up application" plugin defined. That hasn't been done yet, but isn't much work.

[SMorettini]

I don't think this merge request should be merged in this stage. I'm working on some big change on it in my fork.
This setup is not optimal and doesn't work with big setup with a lot of channels because the full dictionary for openmct is downloaded every time when a smarter system should be used and only the dictionary for the channel requested you should be downloaded. Moreover it doesn't work except for the channel made by a single value.

[ReggieMarr]

Out of curiosity how does openmct compare to yamcs? My org uses that so I'm looking into a similar effort for that support

[timcanham]

@ReggieMarr We are aware of yamcs, but haven't gotten around to digging deeply into it. I took a quick look a while ago, and it supports commanding and telemetry aspects that probably could be adapted to F Prime. It doesn't support (as far as I can tell) the F Prime notion of events.

OpenMCT is really meant to display telemetry. It is great for building views and plots and the like, but it doesn't support commanding and events. Our adaptation was meant to run along side the regular F Prime ground system.