As I'm sure many of you have already noticed, something's brewing in the Telestion project. In fact, over the past couple of weeks and months, we've worked hard to revise bad decisions, re-implement core aspects of Telestion (in a better way) and overall preparing Telestion for its first stable release: the v1.0.

While I don't have an exact timeline for when v1 will be released (my best guess would be late Q1 or early Q2 of 2024), I want to make sure you stay in the loop on what's happening, so I've collected a tl;dr of the biggest and most important changes for v1 here. And the best part of it? You can already try a bunch of these things in the current Alpha versions.

(✅ = Ready to be used; 🚧 = Work in Progress)

📬 As mentioned before, we're moving away from Vert.x and will use NATS as our new message bus ✅

🧑‍💻 All code for Telestion libraries in a single repository ( wuespace/telestion ) ✅

🖥️ A fully re-imagined, easy to use way to develop Telestion frontends 🚧

⌨️ Backend Services can be written in:

• TypeScript (run in Deno) ✅
• Go ✅ (requires documentation)
• Python 🚧

📖 A fully revised, intuitive documentation site ✅

💬 A Discord server for easy communication for both contributors and users ✅

We recognize that big changes also mean it's not always easy to migrate. However, we firmly believe that it is in the best interest of the project and all of its users to revise based on what we've learned so far and make Telestion the best framework for build Ground Station / Mission Control Software it can be.

🚫 DEPRECATED: Vert.x-based Telestion 🚫

Attention Telestion Developers! The use of Vert.x for backend services is now deprecated. Instead, we are moving towards TypeScript, Deno, and custom integrations for backend development.

📚 Find all the details here: https://docs.telestion.wuespace.de/vertx-based-telestion-deprecation/

🔄 We are introducing NATS as the distributed message bus/broker, ensuring secure access for Ground Station operators.

⚙️ Although not guaranteed, we may introduce a compatibility layer for Vert.x services in the future. Stay tuned for updates!

We are thrilled to announce that on April 1st, the WüSpace project Daedalus 2 took flight aboard the REXUS 29 rocket in Kiruna, Sweden, utilizing a Telestion-based Ground Station Software. This significant milestone marks the culmination of the Daedalus 2 project and a symbolic reunion between Telestion and its roots.

The integration of Telestion into the Daedalus 2 mission worked perfectly. Frederik Dunschen, the Daedalus 2 project lead, expressed his satisfaction, stating, "Lief mega gut, ich bin restlos überzeugt" (It went exceptionally well, I am entirely convinced).

The Telestion integration boasted an impressive array of features, including 21 custom-built backend services, a comprehensive set of 23 widgets for the Ground Station Operator User Interface, seamless integration with MavLink, an integration with Elxir for efficient retrieval of Iridium SBD-based Telemetry, a suite of custom tooling, and much more.

As Telestion originated from the Daedalus 2 Ground Station Software team, this successful collaboration brings the journey full circle. Although Daedalus 2 now concludes with a Telestion-based Ground Station Software, we are excited to continue developing Telestion for future projects, including WüSpace's newest endeavor: KI-SENS.

To learn more about the remarkable Daedalus 2 project, please visit the Daedalus 2 project website: https://daedalus.wuespace.de. Additionally, explore the Telestion Daedalus 2 Integration GitHub Repository for detailed information and resources: https://github.com/wuespace/telestion-project-daedalus2.

Do you know that feeling when you know exactly that you had a reason to do something the way you did, but just can't put your finger on what it was?

The unfortunate truth is: We also sometimes have that feeling when working on Telestion. Where we made a decision two years ago and just can't remember why we decided to do it that way when now, another way seems to be far more logical.

That's why, from now, on, we're using a system called ADRs (Architectural Decision Records) to document major architectural decisions to keep a chronological log of important choices. And we even created our own shell script for managing them more conveniently which is available in the ADR repository.

Check out the Telestion ADRs or take a look at the repository

We're happy to announce that we've released a new version of the Telestion Client!

The new version includes:

• native desktop notification integration in our existing Notification API
• show and configure dialogs with one function call
• a bugfix in the CLI which errors if the webpack builder compiled with warnings

As always, you can read the full changelog here.

See you next time!

Your Telestion Team

We just released v2.6 of our documentation, and I'm happy to say its changelog is full of exciting items 🎉:

First and foremost, our documentation now lives on a new URL: docs.telestion.wuespace.de. The URL makes it easier to find and overall gives it the position it deserves within our ecosystem (docs lead speaking 😜).

In addition to that, we also have some changes within the docs themselves:

• a new article explaining what Electron is and which role it plays in our ecosystem
• new tutorials surrounding the TelestionVerticle base class recently introduced in the Core as the new way of writing Verticles for Telestion
• new, extensive documentation surrounding the usage and development of Traits on the Application side of things
• new tutorials covering showing dialogs/popups in the Client using APIs from telestion-client-common
• API Reference links for both Client and Application development libraries

Check out the new documentation pages

There are new features in the Telestion Core framework.

This includes:

• a better WithEventBus verticle trait (better generic type support)
• a new verticle trait which provides the Vert.x timing function in a consistent way
• one default local and remote map in the WithSharedData trait for every verticle
• automatic loading of the default configuration in a verticle if provided
• more examples which show the usage of the new features

You can read the full changelog on GitHub.

The new version is available on Maven Central and our GitHub Maven Registry.

Happy hacking wishes you the Telestion Team! 🚀

We have a new release of our documentation pages. Version 2.5 of our documentation is now online 🎉.

The new version includes:

• A new documentation home page
• Tutorials on developing widgets for the Client
• A few improvements to existing pages

You can read the full change notes on GitHub.

Read the Telestion Documentation

We've finally released the first four videos in our "Telestion Concepts" video on the WüSpace YouTube channel.

The series gives you an overview of the most important concepts within the Telestion Ecosystem (may that be the Application, Client, Event Bus, or Widgets) to get you started as quickly as possible.

Watch Telestion Concepts now

Telestion is now on Maven Central! 🎉

Now, you don't need your GitHub Token anymore to access our core packages. Simply add mavenCentral() to your repositories section in your build.gradle.

But no worry, we're continuing to publish to our GitHub Maven repository. So no need to quickly change our build setup. 😉

Check out Telestion on Maven Central!

The Telestion team wishes you Merry Christmas! 🎄

Want to get started using Telestion in your projects and building custom Verticles?

We've just released our new set of written tutorials in our documentation. They explain:

• How to bootstrap a new Telestion project
• How to write a custom Verticle
• How to make your Verticle configurable to enable re-using it in various places

Check out the new tutorials on our Telestion Documentation pages, or let us know what's missing by creating a GitHub issue!

In the past few weeks, we were able to test and verify our Daedalus 2 Ground Station integration in several "dry runs".

As with any good test, we found some minor issues that we've already fixed, but the overall communication worked well, and we're now looking forward to seeing our software run "in the field".

Source code of our Daedalus 2 Ground Station project: GitHub repository

We've just released v2.0.0 of our documentation, which uses Docusuarus v2 to give us an easier way to write our documentation.

The new documentation is available at https://wuespace.github.io/telestion-docs/.

While we originally wanted to write our documentation using DITA (and found it very nice to use, once we got used to it), it simply proved to be too much of a challenge to onboard contributors into writing their documentation using DITA. The new approach allows us to write our documentation in Markdown plus some additional (well-documented) features using MDX, which is right up our alley with our client being developed using React.

telestion-docs on GitHub

Documentation website

The "Backstein" (German for "brick"), our Raspberry Pi and external SSD that runs the Telestion Application for the Daedalus 2 project, is up and running 🎉.

After a few hours of setting up the device and debugging (including friendly negotiations with the PI's Docker Daemon to please pass the serial connector through and talk to the external database 😉), we're happy to say we finally got it working and were able to receive (via UART) some telemetry MavLink messages (from an Arduino emulating the seed software), parse them (thanks to Cedric Bös' work), transform them to a more suitable data structure, log them, write them to a database (thanks to Jan Tischhöfer's database implementation), and display them in our web client.

It's great to see our D2 integration working after many have put a lot of hours into the project.

After extensive work the past few days I was finally able to add the reworked mavlink adapter in its own repository. 🎉

Although it may have less features now than the old adapter which was still part of the Telestion-Core, it is now fully tested and functional and is ready to be used (something what could not be said about the old implementation 😜).

Repository of the new Mavlink-Adapter

It surely was a longtime issue but after a hard winter semester I finally found the time to implement what can only be called a big improvement!

Before, everything that needed data, had to write network specific code which not only from a software designer's perspective is bad practice, it also led to many errors (have fun fixing those 🤪). Now however it is easier than ever to use network streams. And this is how it should be, especially in a Groundstation!

Although the new system is already in use, the old API still exists, it will probably be removed in summer though, so be quick to update! 😊

If you are interested in the progress, take a look at the PR.

We're excited to announce that the first batch of repositories has moved to the new, official WüSpace GitHub organization.

This includes:

• telestion-client
• telestion-rocketsound-psc
• telestion-docs

Soon, we'll also move the other repositories, which require a bit more manual intervention.

If you have projects using old URLs for one of these repositories, just replace "TelestionTeam" with "wuespace" 🙂

After some quite extensive work, it is finally here: The web presence of our project.

It is the first in a series of relaunches of WüSpace websites and we're excited for it to now be online 🙂

For some projects, it isn't enough to visualize the gathered data for internal use. That is also the case for the T-REX 2 project, who additionally need the option to show spectators, either in the internet by live-streaming, or live on a second screen during events, the "internals" of the project.

For this purpose, Pablo Klaschka has recently designed and developed a presentation module / widget, which seamlessly integrates into the frontend and can open a specialized view in a second window (that can then get maximized). This view can include sponsor logos, etc., and is specifically designed for presentation.

That way, potential sponsors on events get to see the system themselves, which, of course, makes a great impression ;-)