Introduction

habitat is a system for uploading, processing, storing and displaying telemetry and related information transmitted from high altitude balloons.

Typically this telemetry takes the form of a GPS position and potentially other data, accompanied by information on who received the data, and is displayed by means of a map or chart (or both) showing the path a balloon took and the historic trend of sensor readings.

Internally, configuration and data is stored in a CouchDB database. The back end is written in Python and is responsible for parsing incoming data and storing it in the database, while the frontend is written independently in JavaScript and HTML and communicates with CouchDB directly to obtain data and display it.

This documentation covers setting up a habitat system, describes the format used to store data in CouchDB, and provides reference documentation for the habitat source code.

Useful habitat links:

• habitat on github
• habitat’s continuous integration server
• this documentation
• habitat home page