Iridium Satellite Signal Strength Monitoring

This repo has the project code for the Iridium Signal Strength Monitoring project. See the full project for details.

There are 3 major components of this project: IridiumSignalQualityMonitor, MQTTWiFiGateway, and the NodeJS web server.

IridiumSignalQualityMonitor

Arduino code for SAMD21 microcontroller (e.g. Arduino Zero, SparkFun SAMD21 mini breakout board, etc.) The basis for this software is this project

This code asks the RockBLOCK 9603 modem for the current signal strength and writes that information over serial to an ESP8266 running the MQTTWiFiGateway firmware (see below).

Dependencies:

• IridiumSBD library - Arduino library for Iridium Short Data Burst messages
• Adafruit GPS library - Arduino GPS library for NMEA sentence parsing
• Adafruit ZeroTimer library - Timer library for SAMD21
• Adafruit GFX library - Core library for displays
• Adafruit SSD1306 library - Library for our Monochrome OLEDs based on SSD1306 drivers

MQTTWiFiGateway

Arduino code for ESP8266 that reads from serial and publishes data to MQTT.

Set your MQTT server and credentials in MQTTWiFiGateway.ino:

const char* mqtt_server = "your_mqtt_server";
const char* mqtt_username = "mqtt_user";
const char* mqtt_password = "mqtt_password";

Dependencies:

• WiFiManager - WiFi Manager for ESP8266
• PubSubClient - MQTT library for ESP8266

NodeJS Web Server

Set your MQTT server and credentials in server.js:

var options = {
        host: 'your_mqtt_server',
        port: 1883,
        username: 'mqtt_user',
        password: 'mqtt_password'
    }

Set your Cesium Ion access token in app.js:

Cesium.Ion.defaultAccessToken = 'YOUR_CESIUM_ION_ACCESS_TOKEN';

To use the MapBox dark imagery like I did, you'll need a MapBox access token. Also set in app.js:

imageryProvider : new Cesium.MapboxImageryProvider({
    mapId: 'mapbox.dark',
    accessToken: 'YOUR_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN'
})

Installation and startup:

cd webserver
npm install
npm start