arms-prototype

Prototype Implementation of Automobile Radio Messaging System transmitter, a safety system made by me, for US Congressional App Challenge 2021.

To Try it Out (Raspberry Pi OS)

1. Install rpitx (see here
2. Go into the rpitx directory and make a symlink to the pocsag command in /usr/bin

   sudo ln pocsag /usr/bin/pocsag

3. Install PyQt5 library

   #Much more reliable than installing it with pip
   sudo apt install python3-pyqt5

4. Clone project from Repo

   git clone https://github.com/266-750Balloons/arms-prototype

5. Go into directory.

   cd arms-prototype

6. Run ARMS frontend

   python3 armsUI.py

7. Tune into 160 Mhz (or go into the code and change it to your preffered) with your POCSAG receiver and start sending messages.

How it works

I have a script, radioSend.py, that parses my codepoints for this system in the JSON file codePoints.py. armsUI.py inputs the words into radioSend.py, and each word of the message is turned into JSON objects with a unique MD5 hash to identity each message and a number representing a word. Each object is put into the rpitx pocsag command. Each word is transmitted twice on 434 MHz.

Credits

• rpitx: POCSAG transmitter program that my scripts use
• Qt UI Framework: UI framework I used.
• Just about every internet forumn you can name, for helping me diagnose issues and learning certain tricks.

License

Because the US Congress's App Challenge wants special rights to use your submission's source code for whatever it wants anyway, I just put it under the MIT License.