SDD Startup Guide - VCSFA-MARS/ThinSat-Program GitHub Wiki

Getting Started with the Space Data Dashboard

The ThinSat Program's Space Data Dashboard is the central hub of the program. Here you will find technical resources, discussion forums, data visualization tools, and program management tools.

As a teacher or club organizer, you will have special administrative privileges that allow you to manage your active Kits and add student accounts (with read-only privileges).

Log into https://sdd.nsldata.com with your Team Administrator gmail account. We recommend using Chrome as your browser.

When you login, you should see the Home Page:

The navigation pane on the left hand side of the browser will take you to all the different areas of the Space Data Dashboard.

If you don't see the navigation pane, your browser window might be too small (or you're on a mobile device). Don't worry, it's still available! Just click the menu icon in the top left to expose the navigation pane.

We'll go through all the tabs later, but first let's get setup!

Managing Your Team

Click the Manage link in the navigation pane on the left-hand side of the Dashboard.

You have two main tools as the team manager:

  1. Add/Remove Student Account
  2. Add Kit

Add/Remove Student Account

We won't be adding any student accounts in this guide, but in the future this is where you go to grant read only access to your Dashboard. This is great for students, parents, school administrators, and sponsoring organizations.

Share what you and your team is doing with your community. After all, you're going to be launching a satellite into space!

Add Kit

Ok, this is the meat and potatoes. When you click the + Add Kit button, you will see the following:

When you want to view your data, it's important to be able to tell where it came from. Each CW01 in your kit is able to send data to the Dashboard, so we need to be able to specify which data set is coming from which CW01.

That's where the MAC address comes in. We've seen this in an earlier Quick Start Guide section. When you power on your CW01, it will display its MAC Address on the OD01 display.

Plug in your xChip assembly. When it powers on, you should see the MAC Address displayed in yellow at the top of OD01 screen.

Type this number into the text field next to your newly created XinaBox Kit 1 and click Submit. You should get a message that the MAC address was successfully changed.

We recommend writing the Kit Number onto the CW01 so you can keep it straight later. The xChips all look alike! Anyway that works for you is fine.

Just remember that "Kit 1" means any data that was transmitted by the CW01 with the MAC Address you just entered. If for some reason you need to associate a new CW01 with "Kit 1" you can just enter the new CW01 MAC Address into the XinaBox Kit 1 text field and click Submit.

Believe it or not, that's it. That's the trickiest thing we'll need to do on the Dashboard. You can decide to add all the kits now, or you can do it later once you've decided how you want to run your program.

Viewing Your Data

If you've been following the Quick Start Guide, then you should have a set of xChips powered up and connected to Wi-Fi. They'll look something like this:

The green light on the CW01 means you have a WiFi connection, and the OD01 screen is showing you the data it's collecting. You just added the MAC address to the Space Data Dashboard in the previous section, so now all we have to do is click the Charts link in the navigation pane.

Since your xChips have been sending data ever since the CW01 light turned green, you'll probably see something like this:

Your Charts page will always default to looking at your data, but you can view any other team's data by using the dropdowns above the charts.

Here are some basic tips:

  • To remove a dataset from a chart, click the X on the right side of the data label.
  • Clicking the Update button will refresh the chart with the latest data.
  • Use the Select Sensor dropdown to add additional data streams to a chart.
  • If you want to zoom into an area, click and drag over the points you want to view.
  • Left-click in the chart to reset the zoom
  • Hover over a point to see details

If you scroll to the bottom of the Charts page, you will see a button to download your data as a .csv file. You can use this in Excel, Matlab, or any other plotting tool to do more

Other Pages

You and your students will be able to access:

  • Discussion Forum for collaborating with other teams (only the team administrator can post)
  • Resources page containing documents, technical drawings, user guides, videos, and more.
  • Wiki links to XinaBox and ThinSat resources, full of technical information, lab guides, experiment ideas, xChip info and more.
  • A Satellite Tracking page that will show you the position of your satellite in real time when it's launched. (Currently tracking the ISS)
  • A Reports section to allow teams to share their findings, post writeups, and collaborate with other teams.
  • A list of all participating Teams and Leading Institutions

Wrapping Up

The Space Data Dashboard will be your home base throughout much of the ThinSat program. We have only scratched the surface of the resources available to your and your students.

If you are following the Quick Start Guide, you're all done! Follow this link back to the Quick Start Guide to see where you can go next!

Troubleshooting

There are only a few common issues:

  1. If you have issues with the login or submitting MAC Addresses to the Kits on the Manage page, try again using Google Chrome.

  2. If you don't see the Manage option, be sure you are logged in with the gmail account associated with the program. Many people have more than one gmail account, and it is easy to be logged into the wrong one without realizing it. Log out of your google account on google.com and log back in with the team administrator account.

If these don't work, contact your leading institution for additional help getting your administrator account correctly linked to your team's page.