Open Road Code

Documentation

Car TUI

Source: apps/carTui/README.md

apps/carTui is the terminal counterpart to Car UI. It provides a curses home menu and navigable automotive destinations while using reusable views under frontends/tui.

Included destinations include:

  • Off-road navigation: heading, pitch, roll, acceleration, angular velocity, GPS state, calibration, and relative-heading reset.
  • Vehicle telemetry: RPM, speed, boost, temperatures, pedal/load values, pressures, airflow, fuel, and module voltage.
  • Radio: FM broadcast, scanner, AM aviation, and FM weather-band receivers with tuning, presets, and receiver telemetry.

Telemetry architecture

Car TUI is a consumer of the OpenRoadCode message bus. Navigation and vehicle state are supplied by producer services rather than by constructing navigation or OBD-II hardware inside the TUI.

navigation service --\
                     > ZeroMQ broker -> MessageDispatcher -> Car TUI
 automotive service -/

NavigationBusState and VehicleBusState cache the latest decoded snapshots for the UI thread.

Start Car TUI

From the repository root:

python3 -m apps.carTui.main

Use --config PATH to select a runtime file when needed.

Full simulated telemetry stack

A simulation runtime should select simulated sources in the producer services. The application itself follows the same subscriber path used with physical hardware.

Start the broker:

python3 -m messaging.zeromq.broker_cli

Start simulated navigation:

python3 -m services.navigation.navigation_service_cli \
  --config config/runtime_simulation.toml

Start simulated automotive telemetry:

python3 -m services.automotive.automotive_service_cli \
  --config config/runtime_simulation.toml

Then start Car TUI:

python3 -m apps.carTui.main

This exercises the same ZeroMQ contracts, dispatcher, shared state, and TUI rendering that will be used with physical sources.

Units

OpenRoadCode telemetry contracts remain SI-normalized. Car TUI converts values only for presentation using common.units.

The unit preference is shared by the Navigation and Vehicle screens. Press u on either screen to toggle between metric and imperial presentation. The underlying NavigationBusState, VehicleBusState, and ZeroMQ messages are not modified.

Controls

Home controls are arrow keys or j/k, Enter to open, and q to quit. Inside a destination, b or Escape returns home and q exits the application.

On Navigation and Vehicle screens, u toggles metric/imperial presentation.

Radio controls are 1–4 to select FM, scanner, airband, or weather band; p toggles the selected receiver; Left/Right tunes by one mode-specific step; and [/] selects the previous or next preset.

Physical telemetry

Physical navigation sources are selected in runtime TOML with source = "device" for the IMU and GPS inputs. The navigation service owns those devices and continues publishing the same contracts.

Physical automotive/ELM327 composition is not yet enabled in services.automotive; source = "device" currently fails explicitly. Once connected, it will replace the simulated VehicleStateSourceIf without requiring changes to Car TUI.

See services/navigation/README.md, services/automotive/README.md, messaging/README.md, and docs/messaging/message_bus_idd.md for service ownership and wire-contract details.