Meta Documentation

Organization:	Project SCINI at Moss Landing Marine Labs
Date:	December, 2007
Disclaimer:	This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ANT-0619622 (http://www.nsf.gov). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Files

docs-index, pdf: This file
video-setup, pdf: How to configure a linux machine to stream and capture video from an Elphel camera when in the field
controls-setup, pdf: How to get a windows machine running to control SCINI
elphel-cheatsheet, pdf: A general collection of information about the elphel camera, overheating, streaming, configuration and troubleshooting, etc.
deploy-cheatsheet, pdf: A proposal for how to run a SCINI mission out of a Tucker; who is responsible for what, what to bring, etc
data-archiving, pdf: Advice for storage media, file formats, and conversion programs
networking, pdf: A table of devices and their IPv4 addresses, plus multicast instructions
scini-main-bottle-pins-markI, pdf: A table of microcontroller pins and the connected devices for the 2007 ROV
rov-minimalist-protocol, pdf: Specification of the communications between the microcontroller and the operator controls program
notes_*: Various random day to day and testing notes

Restructured Text

These files are in the restructured text format, which is similar to many wiki stylized text formats; the text is easy to read and edit, and can be rendered to different file formats like html and pdf with free tools. The output files a little fancy for this kind of thing, but whatever man. From a unix command line with both the tools and a latex package installed, I use these commands to create an html page and a pdf document:

$ rst2html example-file.txt > example-file.html
$ rst2latex example-file.txt > example-file.tex
$ pdflatex example-file.tex

rst2newlatex sometimes give a different style output. If you include images, make sure you bundle the images with the html output, preserving relative path structure. You can ignore or delete the .aux, .log, .out, and other files created by pdflatex. Any errors will either be thrown on the command line or will appear in bright red text in the final document (check for this before printing or distributing!).

If you have a lot of files to render, these commands help:

$ for i in `ls *.txt | sed s/\.txt//`; do rst2html $i.txt > $i.html; done
$ for i in `ls *.txt | sed s/\.txt//`; do rst2latex $i.txt > $i.tex && pdflatex $i.tex; done
$ rm *.aux *.log *.out *.tex

I'm pretty sure there are GUI front ends to restructured text which would make the system easier to use, but if it's too much hassle it should be easy to import the html into a word processor and remove the text and pdf files.