Intro

Welcome to the folder containing all the KENNESAW STATE FSAE data acquisition services. The entire system is Python and MatLab based.

• If you have any questions or need troubleshooting, feel free to reach out to Matthew Samson on Teams, Discord: mathbrook or via email: [email protected]

parser setup

PDF GUIDE:

the parser is the tool to decode our vehicle CAN logs, which look like this:

time,msg.id,msg.len,data
1698174558627,C0,8,0000000001020000

into this:

time,id,message,label,value,unit
2023-10-24T19:09:18.627Z,0xC0,M192_Command_Message,Torque_Command,0.0,Nm

there are two options for using the parser:

1. download and extract the executable to run standalone (simplest but requires updates)

2. install python, clone repo, install packages and run script (more complicated but easier to update)

Downloading the executable

1. Click this link to download the latest windows executable: https://github.com/KSU-MS/KS5e-Data-Logging/releases/latest/download/parser_exe_windows.zip

2. once that download is complete, extract the contents of the .zip file

3. Open the extracted folder and navigate to parser-exe-windows/dist/

4. Click on parser_exe.exe to run it

   • Windows may give a warning when trying to run the program, click on 'more info' and then 'run anyway' to bypass it

Matlab Setup:

For MatLab (used for plotting data), follow KSU's instructions here: https://www.mathworks.com/academia/tah-portal/kennesaw-state-university-31081932.html

You should be able to get it installed and licensed with your student email

manual python install

1. Python 3 is required, and may be installed here: https://www.python.org/downloads/. Make sure it is added to PATH
   • Python 3.8 is recommended to guarantee compatibility
2. If you have not done so already, clone this GitHub repo or download it as a zip, extract, and save to somewhere safe
3. Change directory to the repo. All you have to do is cd KS5e-Data-Logging
4. optional step, create a python virtual environment by running these commands:

pip install virtualenv
python -m virtualenv venv
.venv\scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

why venv is good to use: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41972261/what-is-a-virtualenv-and-why-should-i-use-one

5. Once you are here, download the needed pip libraries by issuing the command pip install -r requirements.txt

User's Guide

If you are a user, everything you need to care about is in the telemetry_exe folder. Navigate to that directory.

There are two services: the Live Console, the Parser and Plotter

Parsing and plotting data

Parsing steps

1. Get the raw data CSVs from the SD card on the vehicle OR download from Microsoft Teams
2. Copy them to a folder on your computer
3. If you chose to manually set up the parser, you can either run the file parser_exe.py with the Python Interpreter or issue the command python parser_exe.py
4. Otherwise if you downloaded the executable, run parser_exe.exe
5. The program will prompt you to select the folder with the data you downloaded
6. Once the program is finished running, it will open the directory where your raw data was
7. You may now retrieve the parsed data from the parsed-data as well as the temp-parsed-data folder and the .mat file output.mat
   • logs in parsed-data are formatted differently than in temp-parsed-data, but the results are the same

If you run the parser in the same raw data folder again, it will overwrite the files in parsed-data and temp-parsed-data

Plotting steps

1. Open dataPlots.m in MatLab
2. In MatLab, first load output.mat by double clicking it on the sidebar. Then click run on dataPlots.m
   • This script will not execute fully if there is not enough data, and it will stop on the first plot it is missing data for
   • comment out plot lines in the script if necessary, or run the script section by section