Ground Station — agent guide

Purpose

groundstation runs on Orange Pi Zero 3W as the control and observability process for the custom OpenIPC/WFB ground station.

It receives final mixed RC channels from RadioMaster GX12 through the dedicated AUX1 UART, logs/renders pilot state, and starts the independent fpv-video launcher for Viture.

Safety boundaries

Primary pilot video must remain independent. Never restart, block, or add buffering to WFB/video decode from this process.
Never modify sticks, arm, flight mode, or existing AUX channels.
The future reverse path may override exactly one explicitly reserved profile AUX with SAFE/NORMAL/HIGH.
No valid heartbeat must return that AUX to its native EdgeTX SAFE value.
UART wiring is 3.3 V TTL only: crossed TX/RX plus GND. Never connect header 5 V or AUX_BOOT.
Do not use headtracking as a transport; it is reserved for a future Viture 3DoF gimbal aircraft.

Wire protocol v1

0x47 0x53             magic "GS"
1 byte                version (1)
1 byte                type
2 bytes little-endian sequence
4 bytes little-endian millisecond timestamp
N bytes               payload
2 bytes little-endian CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE over all preceding bytes

type=1 is RCChannels: payload contains 16 signed little-endian int16 values in final EdgeTX output units (-1024..1024). Validate length and CRC before accepting frames.

Development

Go is the implementation language.
Use golang.org/x/sys/unix for Linux UART termios. Add periph.io only for real GPIO/SPI/I2C display work.
Run gofmt, go test ./..., and go vet ./... before committing.
Keep hardware paths CLI-configurable.
Never commit credentials, Wi-Fi passwords, WFB keys, or live network addresses.

Repository workflow

main must remain deployable.
Keep hardware changes focused and tested separately from protocol parsing.
Grzesiu may maintain focused Gitea issues after the baseline protocol and hardware acceptance are recorded.

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