# Welcome to the SKA Dish SPFC project.
## Getting started
Clone the project (Makefiles incl):
`bash
git clone --recurse-submodules git@gitlab.com:ska-telescope/ska-mid-dish-spfc.git
`
(VSCode users) reopen the project in a devcontainer so that you have tango etc pre-installed. Once that’s done, from a terminal inside this running container, you can do linting, testing or registering the SPFC.
### Description
Single Pixel Feeder Controller (SPFC) is a linux device that controls and monitors the following devices: 1. SPF Band 1 2. SPF Band 2 3. SPF Band 345 4. SPF Vaccum services 5. SPF Helium services
SPFC is a self contained credit card size device powered by 400 MHZ ARM processor, running Busybox Linux OS on 512 MB ROM. It has 128MB of RAM. SPFC has Python2 installed. One can SSH into it to change a tango device configuration file before registering to a tango database. Please note that no SSH is needed in order to register it to the tango database. There are two types of SPFC devices in the ITF:
SPF Controller which is the SPFC unit used by multiple software teams.
SPF Dev which is the SPFC development unit we use as Atlas team for testing.
## Linting
This is useful for keeping your code up to standard.
`bash
make python-format && make python-lint
`
## Testing
Always test your code, preferably locally. This command is the one that tests the python code on your local machine, and may require the use of mocks:
`bash
make python-test
`
### Manual Testing
You can do manual testing against a local deployment running in minikube. In order to create the environment, you will need to have a running minikube, see <https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdi/ska-cicd-deploy-minikube>. Once that has been setup, run the following:
`
eval $(minikube docker-env)
make oci-build-all
make itf-spfc-install-chart
`
This deploys the ska-spfc-deployer helm chart which is a pod job that deploys a pod job that deploys files to SPFC and registers the SPFC Tango device to the database.
### Registering SPFC device to tango database using gitlab job
There is a set of commands that one can run to register the SPFC device to the tango database. This is important, for example, in cases where registration SPFC needs to communicate with Dish.LMC
To test the SPFC registration to tango database, please ensure that the TANGO_HOST environment variable is set on the local laptop to be used for testing. To set the TANGO_HOST variable one can run the export TANGO_HOST=<ip_address>:<port_number> command. Secondly please update the CI/CD environment variable(s) in the ska-mid-dish-spfc repository. They all have descriptions and guide on how they can be used before triggering the deployment.
Once done, one can trigger the registration of the SPFC from the gitlab job called deploy-spfc-register within the deploy stage of the pipeline. A pod called ska-spfc-deployer-* will be deployed in the namespace to register the SPFC. To remove the deployed ska-spfc-deployer-* pod job one can run the remove-spfc-register job within the deploy stage of the pipeline.
### Compiling tango and other SPFC software The following steps need docker buildx to be installed. There are currently two jobs in the gitlab pipelines. One is for building the container for compiling the SPFC (add-spfc-builder) and other one is for running the compiled SPFC software (run-spfc-builder).
The image-pre-build command in the build-spfc.mk makefile is used to prepare the docker buildx and to use quick emulator before the docker buildx image can be built.
The image-build command in the build-spfc.mk is used to build the spfc-builder image and to push it to the registry. One can comment out the docker login -u … and remove the –push flag in order to build docker images locally.