Space Packet Visualizer

[ahotasu]

A common issue we have during system testing between entities (in my experience, particularly instruments talking to spacecraft or spacecraft 'munging' instrument data in their storage/transfer to the ground) is having to bit-bust binary data files supposedly containing CCSDS data (Telemetry Source Packets). I have numerous examples where I have highlighted xxd output (digitally, fortunately) to show to stakeholders where data are bad.

I have long envisioned a visualization tool that would read in a given file, display the contents in a hex dump format (and maybe ASCII decoded, like xxd or od does) and automatically syntax highlight key fields like CCSDS Telemetry Source Packet primary headers with either color-coded text or color-coded backgrounds (or both). Much like a good 'diff' program will show a color-coded bar on/next to the slider, the visualizer could also show color coding for key fields, or perhaps just red for obvious errors such as bad packet lengths, invalid APIDs, gaps in source sequence counts, etc. Since some (good) TS packets also include some form of data validation (checksum, crc, etc.), the visualizer could also validate that.

Again, this could be a completely separate tool, but could also be within a wider scope for SPP, or at the very least, rely on SPP for packet parsing.