Installation

The primary executable of the SentiSystems software is the sentiutils executable, which will acquire sensor data, accurately timestamp each measurement, and distribute the sensor data over a UDP socket. Pre-compiled versions for x64, aarch64/arm64, and arm32 are included in your SentiSystems SharePoint folder binaries. If you need SentiUtils to run on any other architecture, don't hesitate to contact us.

Tip

To simplify the usage of SentiUtils, we recommend running the software as a service. E.g in Ubuntu Linux distributions you can use systemctl and a sentiutils.service file to achieve this. One example service file can be found in the SharePoint folder etc/sentiutils.service. The example file should be edited to include your username and group, as well as updated paths to the sentiutils working directory and exectuable before being deployed on your system.

sentiutils expects to read data from the SentiBoard through /dev/ttySentiboard02. Read details for how to set this up at the SentiBoard Installation page.

Reading sensor data from SentiUtils requires google protobuf to be installed on your system. On Debian based distributions this can be installed by sudo apt install protobuf-compiler, or you could download prebuilt binaries or compile it from source from their official github page.

Config File

The config file decides how SentiUtils should parse each sensor port's sensor data, as well as setting a time_source for the SentiBoard. If a time_source is available, all messages output from SentiUtils will be time-tagged with the time_source as reference.

An example config file can be found in the SharePoint folder configs/config.json and is repeated here with a clock_filter included

{
  "parser": {
    "rs232_1": "xsens",
    "uart1": "ublox",
    "uart2": "ublox",
    "spi1": "adis164xx",
    "spi2": "ic",
    "oc1": "trigger",
    "udp_sink": {
      "host": "127.0.0.1",
      "port": 21314
    }
  },
  "clock_filter": {
    "time_source": "uart2"
  }
}

Running the SentiUtils Software

Assuming you have followed the steps from the SentiBoard Installation page, the SentiUtils software is simply started by connecting the SentiBoard to your host computer, and running ./sentiutils --config <your_config.json>. This can be done either directly from a terminal window, or alternatively as a service.

To see a list of available run-time parameters, you can run ./sentiutils --help.

Checking SentiUtils Status

While SentiUtils is running, a log file is generated inside a logs folder created in the directory SentiUtils is running from (logs/sentiutils_logs.txt) E.g tail -f sentiutils_logs.txt will give a continuous output of the events logged from SentiUtils