New Companion Computer software: Rpanion-server

@stephendade
Hi Stephen, I pulled the latest changes and sadly nothing is working anymore. All I get is the menu and the page title with a turning circle for the flightcontroller, network and video page.
Flight Logs is showing two buttons and a checkbox above an empty table. Clicking “enable logging”
results in the following error message:
“Error setting logging: SyntaxError: Unexpected token P in JSON at position 0”.

@count74: I’ve just tested it on my Raspberry Pi and wasn’t able to replicate your issue. Did you do a npm install and npm run build after pulling in the new changes?

Rpanion-server now keeps a logfile. It’s at ./logs/app.log. Could I get a copy of that file? It may show where the error is occuring.

EDIT:
If you’re running rpanion-server as a service, you may need to re-copy the service file:
sudo cp rpanion.service /etc/systemd/system

This is pretty awesome! Need to get zerotier support and USB modems in here (huawei hi-link lte usb cards) and we are really off to the races! Amazing work! Definitely going to try.

Hi Stephen,

I did a complete reinstall with your image.
Rpanion is running again, but telemetry is really slow. Sometimes MissionPlanner connects, but the status screen only gets updates every 5s and the parameters never load completely. At other times connect fails after a few seconds.
Qgroundcontrol announces connection lost, connection regained every few seconds.
Baud rates are matching, I enabled/disabled logging, removed all telemetry outputs and added only one, but so far nothing helped. Here is the app.log:
app.log (75.0 KB)

Three reboots later and it is suddenly working, without changing anything…

I’ve run some further tests and found that there is a little packet loss over Wifi connections. Can you check if you’ve got the same behavior over ethernet?

Additionally, I’ve created a fresh disk image based off the latest source:
https://rpanion-files.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/Rpanion-server/Rpanion-Server-0.4.0-Raspian3.img.xz. Try using that.

There’s also additional logging in the latest rpanion-server, so if you’re still having issues post an app.log and I’ll take a look at it.

Part of the problem with the unreliable telemetry might have been insufficient power for the RPi. There are the Alfa Network adapter and a nightvision USB camera with IR LEDs connected to USB. I have now connected a few capacitors (ca. 5 Farad) to the 5V pin of the RPi and so far the telemetry works each time after reboot. I will pull the github changes today.

Just to report: Rpanion is working perfectly with Zerotier-One. I installed Zerotier on my mecanum rover and Rpanion adds the tunnel adapter to the network interfaces. I then added a telemetry forward to the Zerotier IP of my laptop and MissionPlanner receives the telemetry stream. Video is working, too, but I have to put it to a real test using a mobile connection on one side. My big rover still refuses to let Zerotier run, perhaps because I boot it from an USB stick.

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Hi Stephen,
I run a test this weekend on raspberry pi zero, with the new image (0.5), unfortunately I could not reach the settings page at 10.0.2.100:3000 as adviced. The ssid is up and running and I could also connect with my pc. But the webserver seems not working or it is on an other ip/port.
Then I tried on a 3B+, it was ok and I set up the mavlink forwarding, connection was OK to Mission Planner too. But when I swapped back the sd card to the pi zero, nothing worked again: no forwarding, no webserver.
Is it suppoesed to be a compatibility issue with the zero? I could ssh to it so it.
thanks,

Peter

After some debugging, the answer is: yes.

Since the Ras Pi Zero has a different processor architecture to the Ras Pi 3/4, the disk images I linked above won’t work. You would need to install from source.

I’ll work on getting a Ras Pi Zero disk image out, but it’ll take a week or two.

Thanks for reporting the issue!

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Hi Stepen,
Your support is much appreciated! I am then looking forward this image for zero. By the meantime I will try to set set up the rpanion server from source.
peter

Hi Stephen,

I tried the installation with

curl -sL https://github.com/stephendade/Rpanion-server/raw/master/deploy/RasPi-deploy.sh | bash -

it runs for longtime, then at 82%, it is stopped always at the same stage, doing some python staff:

image
after that the ssh connection could not be reestablished. I have done 3 tests with the same results.

peter

It’s an issue with the networkmanager package. When the RasPi-deploy.sh installs that package it resets the Wifi settings (since it’s not using wpa_supplicant anymore).

I’ll have to think of a way around this. Either use a USB-Ethernet dongle to install on the Zero or think of a better order to install the packages.

yesterday I tried to do an installation on the zero. Not having an ethernet dongle, I set up a usb cable connection between the pc and the pi zero. The process went beyond the point, where it was stopped last time. I was happy. Unfortuantely few minutes later exited saying that Nodesource node.js could not be installed that way on ARMv6. By chance I have found on internet a way to do it, soI have installed it.
The problem is now that I don’t know how much is missing from the installation. I tried, but the rpanion wifi does not work anymore.

Hi Stephen,

I’d like to thank you have created an awesome piece of software that works great as a charm.

My case is a networking help request needed. The thing is that Rpanion is working perfectly for me on my home intranet. Relay telemetry data with a pixhawk/pi3B+ to Mission Planner and video streaming work as it is designed to be.

However, my plan is to push it one step forward that the Pixhawk/Pi on UAV runs telemetry over 4G LTE connection for long range MP operations. The following is my intended data path:

(UAV)PX/Pi (Softether client on 4G ) --> VPN tunnel (tap_soft) --> PC Softether VPN server (Home LAN) --> Mission Planner pc host (Home LAN).

IP configuration

Pi (192.168.11.98 ) --> tap_soft interface(192.168.1.152 get assigned) --> Home Router(192.168.1.1) --> Softether VPN Server(192.168.1.249) --> Mission Planner PC(192.168.1.178)

Problem Description:

When pi (running Rpanion Server) boots up with softether vpn running, tap_soft interface has no ip initially, once I run the command “dhclient tap_soft”, tap_soft automatically obtained an ip address from Home LAN segment which is 192.168.1.152 and the established new ip routing table (route -n) looks normal too that both 192.168.1.0/24 gateway 192.168.1.1 together with 192.168.11.0/24 gateway 192.168.11.1 listed out. The odd bit is that when I ping 192.168.1.1 from Pi, the remote home router is unreachable and so as the other hosts at home LAN are also unreachable, plus the resolv.conf reverts to nameserver 192.168.1.1, so the Pi lost access to named hosts on the internet (e.g. www.google.com , etc) too. I even tried to flush the Pi’s iptables (firewall)rules by “iptables -F” but that didn’t help either. I then tried to configure the tap_soft interface directly through the “Network Configuration” web page on Pi port 3000, this has no luck as well. Having browsed to a lots of other posts on Softether VPN on Pi forum that tips and tutorials also get no progress. Remark – I flashed the Pi with the latest image of Rpansion Server and only have softether vpn server package configured as a vpn client on startup, no other extra packages were added.

One observation I noticed was that I used to have the last second image of APSync downloaded from Ardupilot web site flashed onto the Pi which worked without this vpn issue when using the same above VPN configuration. I didn’t even need to issue the command “dhclient tap_soft”, the Pi on Apsync automatically picked up an assigned ip address on 192.168.1.x segment and I could ping any hosts at home LAN network. Basically, that version of APSync just worked on vpn connection straight away.

I compare the working version of APSync ( uname -a --> linux 4.19.66-v7+ ) utlizing dhcpcd daemon verse against the vesrion 4.19.97-v7+ utilizing Network Manager which encounters the non-working VPN situation.

Help is Needed:
Please shed a light on where I can overcome the issue of not able to access remote hosts on home network or share another method that I can accomplish my project. Many thanks in advance.

William

thanks for the install script for the zero! I have already tried it. it run through without any errors. then I tried to config the hotspot, but apparently nmcli was not yet available:

pi@rpanion:~ $ curl -sL https://github.com/stephendade/Rpanion-server/raw/master/deploy/wifi_access_point.sh | bash -
+ APNAME=WiFiAP
+ SSID=rpanion
+ KEY=rpanion123
+ IFNAME=wlan0
+ sudo nmcli connection add type wifi ifname wlan0 con-name WiFiAP ssid rpanion
sudo: nmcli: command not found

so I installed it run again the command. it seemed ok, but since I lost ssh connection and rpanion ssid did not show up either. tomorrow I will connect by usb and try to fix the hotspot

The script is not entirely stable at this time - still need to sort out a few package install issues.

The RPi install script should automatically configure the hotspot at the end of the script.

Have you looked at using Zerotier instead? I find it fairly easy use to use and configure.

I’ll look into the Softether issues. I suspect it’s due to my using of nmcli rather than other older network manager system of the RPi.

Hi Stephen,
Thank you for your prompt reply.
I’ll give Zerotier a good try and see if it is a viable alternative for my objective.
Meanwhile, I am looking forward to your finding in Softether vpn running in conjunction with Rpanion Server as I have quite a number of Softether installations already.

I’ve now got a Raspberry Pi Zero image, download link at https://www.docs.rpanion.com/software/rpanion-server

The deploy script for the Zero is working, but it’s not 100% reliable. I think it’s a Wifi issue, as the script appear to work better when closer to my Wifi AP.

And as a general note for everyone, there’s now a homepage for Rpanion-server: https://www.docs.rpanion.com/software/rpanion-server. All downloads and user manuals are there.

I’ve also released version 0.5.0 which contains a number of bugfixes mentioned in this thread. Particular thanks to @count74 and @sujgojo for their bug reports and testing!