This is a python application that allows the simulation of drones for fast lightning strike investigation and potential suppression by a fleet of water bombers.

Installation

This application has been designed to run on either a windows or a unix style operating system or terminal. The windows installation will be sufficient if active development is not required, however active development will be much easier on a unix style system. On windows systems, this can be achieved using the windows subsystem for linux (WSL). The windows subsystem for linux can be installed by following the steps detailed here.

Windows Installation Instructions

On a windows system, we will install the drone simulation application in Windows PowerShell. To open Windows PowerShell as an administrator, right-click the windows start button and select Windows PowerShell (Admin) and then select "Yes" when prompted.

Installing Chocolatey

We will use the package manager Chocolatey to install the correct versions of python. To install Chocolatey, open Windows PowerShell as an administrator and run the command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force;
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072;
iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex

You may need to reopen PowerShell before using choco (Chocolatey) in the next step.

Installing Python

As this is a python application, we first need to install python. We will use Chocolatey to install version 3.8.6. Open Windows PowerShell as an administrator and run the command:

choco install -y python3 --version=3.8.6 --force

If the installation is successful, python 3.8 can then be accessed using the command py -3.8 (and exited using the command exit()).

Installing Git

By default, Windows PowerShell does not come with the useful version control system git. Hence if git is not installed on your system (this can be checked using the command git --version in PowerShell, if PowerShell displays a version of git this indicates git is already installed), please install it using the following command:

choco install -y git.install --params "/GitAndUnixToolsOnPath /SChannel /NoAutoCrlf"

Setting the Execution Policy

We also need to change the PowerShell execution policy to allow us to run external scripts by running the following command in PowerShell (with admin):

set-executionpolicy remotesigned

Downloading and Installing the Bushfire Simulation

Now that we have python and git installed, open a PowerShell window in the folder that you would like to download the bushfire simulation application. This can be done by opening File Explorer, navigating to the folder in which you want to start PowerShell, then typing powershell into the address bar and hitting enter. Alternately, you can start WindowsPowershell as before and then navigating to the target folder using cd (change directory). You can now run the following commands to download and install the application:

1. git clone https://github.com/ANUBushfireInitiative/bushfire-drone-simulation
2. cd bushfire-drone-simulation
3. .\tools\windows-install.ps1

Congratulations! The ANU Bushfire Initiative's Drone Simulation is now (hopefully) successfully installed and can be run using the command

bushfire_drone_simulation --help

You can also now start a documentation server by following the documentation instructions below.

Future Updates

To update to the latest copy of the bushfire_drone_simulation, please run git pull in the terminal from anywhere within the root directory of the program. Then run .\tools\windows-install.ps1 from the root directory of the program. Note that this is only necessary if updates have been made to the repository since cloning, however it is good practise to run git pull and then .\tools\windows-install.ps1 at the begining of each session.

Unix installation instructions (Including WSL)

Setting up Python Environment

The python code in this application requires python 3.8 or greater. To maintain the integrity of other python applications on your system, it is highly recommended to use a separate python environment for the bushfire drone simulation, however it can also be installed directly if your python version meets the requirements.

Installing a python environment

To set up a separate python environment (recommended), we will use pyenv which allows us to isolate the bushfire drone simulation development environment and python version. To install pyenv, please follow the instructions detailed here. During this installation, you will get the warning

WARNING: seems you still have not added 'pyenv' to the load path.
# Load pyenv automatically by adding
# the following to ~/.bashrc:

To add this text to ~./bashrc, run the command

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.pyenv/shims:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv init --path)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

You now need to reload your shell which can be done by restarting your terminal or running the command

exec $SHELL

To create a pyenv environment called bushfires for this application with python version 3.8.6, run the commands

1. pyenv install 3.8.6
2. pyenv virtualenv 3.8.6 bushfires

Then, prior to following the installation steps below and before each time using the bushfire_drone_simulation application, you will need to enter the bushfires python environment using the command

pyenv activate bushfires

Downloading and Installing the Bushfire Simulation

To download the source code and install the application, please open a terminal, navigate to the folder in which you would like to perform the installation and run the commands

1. git clone https://github.com/ANUBushfireInitiative/bushfire-drone-simulation
2. cd bushfire-initiative-simulation
3. source tools/install-dev-env

Congratulations! The ANU Bushfire Initiative's Drone Simulation is now (hopefully) successfully installed and can be run using the command

bushfire_drone_simulation --help

Future Updates

To update to the latest copy of the bushfire_drone_simulation, please run git pull in the terminal from anywhere within the root directory of the program. Then run source tools/install-dev-env from the root directory of the program. Note that this is only necessary if updates have been made to the repository since cloning, however it is good practise to run git pull and then source tools/install-dev-env at the begining of each session.

Documentation

The documentation for this application is a combination of manual and automatically generated components, primarily contained within the docs/source directory. This consists of some graphical components which rely on the graphviz application. It can be installed using the command

Windows:

choco install graphviz; dot -c

Unix:

sudo apt-get install graphviz

You can now start a local documentation server by running the command

Windows:

py -3.8 tools/doc_server.py start-server

Unix:

python tools/doc_server.py start-server

from within the root folder of the project. By default, this will host the documentation at http://localhost:8000. For more information about the application, contributing, or testing, please see this documentation.