Requirements

Hardware

Other hardware than listed below may be used, but only the following hardware is supported and tested:

• Raspberry Pi 4 (we use the 4GB option, but that's probably not required)
• 8GB or larger Class 10 MicroSD Card
• Raspberry Pi Official 7" Touchscreen (or whatever screen you prefer)
• Peripherals (Keyboard, Mouse, USB cables for power)
• Touchscreen Case - optional, but really nice to have
• USB Battery Pack with at least 2A output - for portable setups - optional

Software (these will all be installed automatically by the setup script)

• Python 3.11+ (installed on Raspbian by default)
• Various python libraries
• Kivy 2.1 (Python graphical library)

Some Basics

It's really best to try these steps on a fresh Raspbian install.

If you are new to Unix-like operating systems it might be useful to familiarize yourself with basic Unix commands.

Operating System Installation

Step 1: Follow these instructions from the Raspberry Pi Foundation to install the Raspberry Pi OS on your SD card.

Setting up the Pi for the Mimic project

Step 2:

The setup commands are all done from a terminal. Once you have powered on the pi and it is at the desktop screen, open a terminal window by selecting the terminal shortcut (Menu -> Accessories -> Terminal) or Ctrl-Alt-T.

Setup script

Our setup script does all the work for you. It will even set up Kivy and config all the settings. - Please let us know if this script doesn't work.

To use the setup script, first clone the repo, then enter the Mimic directory and simply run the setup.py script. If the setup fails, you can try re-running the script or manually running the command that failed

Step 3:

    git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ISS-Mimic/Mimic.git/ 
    cd Mimic
    python setup.py

That should be it! The setup script will take a few minutes at least, but once it finished (with no errors) everything should be properly setup and mimic should be ready to run.

The Mimic program interfaces with the server that receives the actual ISS telemetry. Whenever a telemetry value is updated, iss_telemetry.py updates the SQLite database (iss_telemetry.db) with the new value. The Python GUI.py app retrieves these values from the database and displays them to the user.

You should frequently "pull" the latest version of the Mimic repository to make sure you have the latest version of the code

    cd ~/Mimic/Pi/
    git pull

Launch GUI.py

Now is finally the time to launch the main program! From ~/Mimic/Pi, run the following:

    cd ~/Mimic/Pi/
    python GUI.py