Tango Station Control

Station Control software related to Tango devices.
Please consult the online documentation!

Index

• Installation
  • Prerequisites
  • Bootstrap
• User documentation (ReadTheDocs (Sphinx / ReStructuredText))
• Docker compose & station services documentation
  • Timescaledb
  • Jupyter startup files
  • Tango Prometheus exporter
• Developer Documentation
  • Deployments
  • Versioning
• Source code documentation
  • Attribute wrapper documentation
  • Archiver documentation
  • Adding a new tango device
  • HDF5 statistics
• Unit tests
• Integration tests
• Release Notes

Installation

Prerequisites

After checking out this repo, be sure to also check out the submodules:

git submodule init
git submodule update

You will also need:

• docker
• docker-compose
• make
• bash

Bootstrap

The bootstrap procedure is needed only once. First we build all docker containers, and load the initial configuration. This may take a while:

cd docker-compose
make bootstrap

By default bootstrap will configure the station to use simulators. You can lookup alternative configurations in the CDB directory.

Now we can start all containers, and make sure everything is up:

make start
make status

If not, you can inspect why with docker logs <container>. The containers will automatically be restarted on reboot or failure. Stop them explicitly to bring them down (make stop <container>).

Most notably, you will have web interfaces available at:

• http://localhost:8888 (Jupyter Lab)
• http://localhost:3000 (Grafana).

Development

For development you will need several dependencies including:

git g++ gcc make docker docker-compose shellcheck graphviz python3-dev \
python3-pip python3-tox libboost-python-dev libtango-cpp pkg-config

Of these docker-compose must be at least 2.0 and Python 3.10 or higher. Alternatively, tox can be installed through pip using pip install tox.

Finally, running unit tests relies on availability of casacore data see: lofar-device-base Dockerfile for details.

Versioning

When changing behavior a new version for Lofar Station Control should be reserved. To do this please follow semantic versioning.

Next change the version in the following places:

1. The VERSION file.
2. Add a Release note for the given version.
3. Once the merge requests is merged to master, add a tag with the version such as v0.3.2 or v0.3.3 etc
4. The tag can be deployed to the environments, manually, through https://git.astron.nl/lofar2.0/tango/-/tags

Release Notes

• 0.11.2 Fix sleep duration in archiver test
• 0.11.1 Fix event unsubscription in TemperatureManager
• 0.11.0 Added StationManager device
• 0.10.0 Add AntennaToSdpMapper and fpga_sdp_info_* mapped attributes in Antennafield device
• 0.9.0 Statistics writer: moved the whole functionality to lofar-station-client repository
• 0.8.0 Statistics writer: HDF5 format overhaul (removed values, added and moved attributes), Statistics writer: Added --field parameter to record statistics of a specific AntennaField, AntennaField: Added RCU_DTH_on_R, RCU_DTH_freq_R(W), RCU_band_select_R, RCU_attenuator_dB_R.
• 0.7.2 Added sdp.subband_frequency_R, antennafield.Frequency_Band_RW, and support for spectral inversion
• 0.7.1 Add restore backup configuration for Configuration device
• 0.7.0 Raised required Python version to 3.10
• 0.6.0 Changed recv.ANT_mask_RW and recv.ANT_mask_R into 32x3 matrices
• 0.5.1 Add loading and updating methods for Configuration device
• 0.5.0 Add Configuration device
• 0.4.1 Fix for missing SDP attributes for spectral inversion
• 0.4.0 Have most containers report health status and add make await command
• 0.3.1 Fix for applying boot device dsconfig
• 0.3.0 Initial version of deployment scripts and functionality
• 0.2.0 Extend Beamlet device with FPGA source address attributes
• 0.1.2 Fix StatisticsClient accessing last_invalid_packet_exception parameter