Waggle

Waggle is the CU Robotics telemetry service: a Rust/Axum backend that buffers incoming telemetry frames and a React (Vite) dashboard that renders them in the browser. Producers POST JSON batches to /batch; connected clients receive live updates over /ws.

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain via rustup.
• Node.js 20+ and npm. You can install Node with ./tools/install.sh on Ubuntu-based hosts.
• Python 3 if you plan to use the replay/export utilities in tools/.

Quick Start

# Install frontend dependencies and build the production bundle
npm install --prefix client
npm run build --prefix client

# Run the backend (serves the built dashboard at http://localhost:3000/)
cargo run

Development Loop (hot reload)

# Terminal 1 – backend
cargo run

# Terminal 2 – frontend
cd client
npm run dev   # Vite dev server on http://localhost:5173

The dev server proxies WebSocket traffic to ws://localhost:3000/ws, so keep the backend running.

Publishing Telemetry

• HTTP: POST a WaggleData JSON object to /batch. The backend converts embedded PNGs to 500×500 JPG thumbnails and stores up to 10 recent frames while clients are disconnected.
• WebSocket: Connect to /ws, send any message to mark the client ready, and the server will start streaming JSON arrays of frames at up to 100 Hz.

Minimal example:

{
  "sent_timestamp": 1728000000,
  "graph_data": {
    "Battery Voltage": [
      { "x": 1728000000.0, "y": 12.6 }
    ]
  },
  "string_data": {
    "Mode": { "value": "Autonomous" }
  }
}

See docs/api.md for the full schema (images, SVG overlays, robot pose data, etc.).

Tooling

• cargo run --example simulator — generates fake telemetry to exercise the dashboard without hardware.
• tools/replay.py — replays saved telemetry into a live Waggle instance (requires Python 3).
• tools/export_video.py — exports replayed image streams as numbered JPG sequences.

Testing & Linting

• Backend: cargo fmt and cargo clippy --all-targets.
• Frontend: npm run lint --prefix client and npm run build --prefix client.

Contribution Checklist

• Run the formatting/linting commands above before opening a PR.
• Capture screenshots or short screencasts when changing UI behavior.
• Keep docs/ in sync with new API fields or workflow changes.
• Coordinate schema or dashboard updates with team lead and the hive team so downstream consumers stay aligned.