Explanatory
The who, how, what, and why’s of PILOT Drive
Why does PILOT Drive have “services”?
Different services within PILOT Drive are used serve a functionality/tasks within the application. Services are frequently relaying real time data to the UI and for that reason need to be ran asynchronously. This is currently done via the use of multiprocessing Processes but this may be changed moving forward. All of a service’s events that need to be conveyed to the UI are pushed via a “Master Event Queue”, which is a multiprocessing queue that is available to all processes, as it is provided at service creation (This same Queue concept is used for logging). It’s important to note that not all services utilize the service they’re provided, like the settings service. This returns shortly after sending the settings to the frontend.
Services also can provide optional callbacks for when the UI sends data. For example, the UI sends the command to pause the current song, in which the media service’s callback is passed the command.
For better visualization of the flow of PILOT Drive, see the basic data flow diagram
- Examples of services are:
Vehicle: Provides live OBD data on the connected vehicle
Phone: Displays phone notifications and information in real time
Media: Manages the A/V of the head unit
What is the ideal PILOT Drive setup?
The original vision for PILOT Drive back in 2018 was to be fully ran and built around the Raspberry Pi, so much of this functionality is catered toward usage on the Pi. Though, the long term goal is to extend compatibility for a wide array of Single Board Computers and other linux-based machines. As it stands, PILOT Drive can run (and has been tested) on Debian (Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS), and Fedora.
The UI is also currently built with the assumption that the user will be using a touchscreen, and while it can respond well to different sizes, it is primarily catered to a width of ~800px-1000px and a height of 600px-800px. Moving forward, it will be more reponsive.
So, the TDLR here is PILOT Drive should run on any host that runs desktop versions of Debian/Fedora, has a (touch) display, Python 3.11 and a reasonable amount of memory.
What browsers does PILOT Drive support?
PILOT Drive was built around Mozilla Firefox, but has also been mildly tested on Chromium. It should work well on both. More are likely supported, but this is all that has been tested.
What does an overview of PILOT Drive look like?
