Transferring Files to an OBC

Once a satellite is in orbit, the file transfer service can be used to transfer files both to and from the ground.

Pre-Requisites

We’ll be using the file transfer client in order to communicate with the file transfer service on our OBC, which is automatically included with the Kubos SDK (as of v1.8.0).

If you are using a local development environment, instead of an instance of the SDK, you’ll need to clone the repo and navigate to the clients/kubos-file-client folder. You’ll then run the program with cargo run -- {command args}.

Syntax

The file transfer client has the following command syntax:

kubos-file-client [options] (upload | download | cleanup) source-file [target-file]

Required arguments:

  • Operation to perform

    • upload - Transfer source-file on the local host to target-file location on the remote target
    • download - Transfer source-file on the remote target to target-file location on the local host
    • cleanup - Cleanup the endpoint service’s temporary storage directory

  • source-file - The file to be transferred. May be a relative or absolute path.

  • -P {host_port} - The UDP port that the file transfer service will send responses to.

Optional arguments:

  • target-file - Final destination path for the transferred file. If not specified, the root file name from source-file will be used and the file will be placed in the current directory of the destination.
  • -h {host IP} - Default: 0.0.0.0. IP address of the local host to use.
  • -r {remote IP} - Default: 0.0.0.0. IP address of the file transfer service to connect to.
  • -p {remote port} - Default: 7000. UDP port of the file transfer service to connect to.
  • -s {storage_prefix} - Default: file-storage. Name of the directory which should be used for temporary file transfer storage.
  • -c {chunk_size} - Default: 4096. Size, in bytes, of the individual chunks the file should be broken into before transfer.
  • -t {hold_count} - Default: 6. The number of times the client should fail to receive data from the endpoint service before giving up and exiting.

Sending a File to an OBC

We’ll start by transferring a file to our OBC. For this tutorial, we’ll be transferring the application file that was created as part of the mission application on an OBC tutorial to the kubos user’s home directory on the OBC.

We’ll need to specify the OBC’s IP address and the port that the file transfer service is listening on. By default, this is port 8008.

We will also need to specify the port that the file transfer service will be sending data back on. There is no default value, so in this tutorial we will use port 8028. You will need to modify the file /home/system/etc/config.toml on-board the OBC and add the following line under the [file-transfer-service] section:

downlink_port = 8028

After modifying the config.toml it will be necessary to restart the file transfer service by running the following command on the OBC:

$ ./etc/init.d/S99kubos-core-file-transfer restart

Our transfer command should look like this:

$ kubos-file-client -r 10.0.2.20 -p 8008 -P 8028 upload /home/vagrant/my-app/my-mission-app.py /home/kubos/my-mission-app.py

Or, from your local dev environment:

$ cargo run -- -r 10.0.2.20 -p 8008 -P 8028 upload /home/vagrant/my-app/my-mission-app.py /home/kubos/my-mission-app.py

The output from the client should look like this:

16:55:56 [INFO] Starting file transfer client
16:55:56 [INFO] Uploading local:/home/vagrant/new-user/my-mission-app.py to remote:/home/kubos/my-mission-app.py
16:55:56 [INFO] -> { 768720, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, 1 }
16:55:56 [INFO] -> { 768720, export, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, /home/kubos/my-mission-app.py, 33277 }
16:55:56 [INFO] <- { 768720, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, false, [(0, 1)] }
16:55:56 [INFO] -> { 768720, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, 0, chunk_data }
16:55:58 [INFO] <- { 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, true }
16:55:58 [INFO] <- { 768720, true }
16:55:58 [INFO] Operation successful

The file transfer service maintains a temporary storage directory with the data from transferred files. As a result, if you run the upload command again, you should see a slightly truncated output:

16:15:08 [INFO] Starting file transfer client
16:15:08 [INFO] Uploading local:/home/vagrant/new-user/my-mission-app.py to remote:/home/kubos/my-mission-app.py
16:15:08 [INFO] -> { 184278, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, 1 }
16:15:08 [INFO] -> { 184278, export, 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, /home/kubos/my-mission-app.py, 33277 }
16:15:08 [INFO] <- { 62c3491309b0bf9af5b367bea18471b8, true }
16:15:08 [INFO] <- { 184278, true }
16:15:08 [INFO] Operation successful

Receiving a File from an OBC

Next, we’ll request that the OBC send us the application debug log file:

$ kubos-file-client -r 10.0.2.20 -p 8008 -P 8028 download /var/log/app-debug.log

We’re not specifying a destination file, which will result in the transferred file being saved as app-debug.log in our current directory.

The output from the client should look like this:

17:56:27 [INFO] Starting file transfer client
17:56:27 [INFO] Downloading remote: /var/log/app-debug.log to local: app-debug.log
17:56:27 [INFO] -> { import, /var/log/app-debug.log }
17:56:27 [INFO] <- { 796611, true, 1a564e8da7b83c2d6a2a44d447855f6d, 1, 33188 }
17:56:27 [INFO] -> { 796611, 1a564e8da7b83c2d6a2a44d447855f6d, false, [0, 1] }
17:56:27 [INFO] <- { 796611, 1a564e8da7b83c2d6a2a44d447855f6d, 0, chunk_data }
17:56:29 [INFO] -> { 796611, 1a564e8da7b83c2d6a2a44d447855f6d, true, None }
17:56:29 [INFO] -> { 796611, true }
17:56:29 [INFO] Operation successful

We can then check the contents of the transferred file:

$ cat /var/log/app-debug.log
1970-01-01T03:23:13.246358+00:00 Kubos my-mission-app:<info> Current available memory: 497060 kB
1970-01-01T03:23:13.867534+00:00 Kubos my-mission-app:<info> Telemetry insert completed successfully