PrestoDecom
Software

Presentation

PrestoDecom is a portable extraction tool for telemetry parameters from binary archives, coming with a graphical user interface to navigate the Satellite DataBase.

It was developed in 2003 for the Proteus spacecraft platform, and was adopted by more than twenty different projects and platforms in and outside CNES (Pléiades, Calipso, Corot, Jason, Smos, Elisa, Parasol, Picard, Galileo, IASI, Doris, SpaceBus 4000, Iridium, Sentinel-3, Exomars to name only the most well-known).

PrestoDecom can extract physical telemetry parameter values into either human-readable ASCII files, or export them towards Microsoft Excel® or PrestoPlot®.

Among its greatest strengths are its ease of use and user-friendliness, gained through years of experience and feedback from its user community. Moreover, its inclusion in the control centres for the Proteus, Myriade, Pléiades and Galileo platforms and its use during IVQ for spacecrafts based on the Proteus platform are a pledge to its maturity.

Current version

The current version is PrestoDecom 24.10.

Next version

The next version of PrestoDecom is not yet planned.

Features

Here is a list of some PrestoDecom features

  • Offline telemetry archive extraction

    PrestoDecom offers highly optimized extraction of parameters from standalone telemetry archives, supporting a wealth of platforms and telemetry formats.

    Its user-friendly graphical interface lets the user navigate the Satellite DataBase (SDB) packets and all their parameters to select only those that need be extracted.

    PrestoDecom also retrieves from the SDB and handles transfer functions, computation of ground-computed parameters, significant condition, and alarms.

  • Multiple extraction formats

    PrestoDecom allows extraction of telemetry parameters for analysis directly towards Microsoft Excel®, PrestoPlot®, or in raw text format. Analysis can begin straight away as PrestoDecom handles both extracting the data and opening the preferred viewer afterwards.

  • Fully extensible

    PrestoDecom can be extended through plugins. Plugins may add handling of new archive formats, special processing for specific APIDs, support for new extraction formats, and much more.

  • Accessible documentation

    PrestoDecom includes a comprehensive user manual that is directly accessible from the software interface.


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Frequently Asked Questions

Which operating systems does PrestoDecom run on ?

PrestoDecom targets the following operating systems:

Operating Systems32 bits64 bits
Windows 7, 10, 11
RedHat/CentOS 7, 8, 9
RedHat/CentOS 5

PrestoDecom should also run fine on other Windows and Linux versions.

Why can't I run PrestoDecom on a headless Linux machine if I'm only using batch mode ?

Since PrestoDecom uses Tk, it requires the X11 libraries to run, and a working X11 display. This is still the case even in batch mode.

On a headless machine, you may use Xvfb to provide PrestoDecom with a virtual X11 display. This can be done as follows:

 # Start the virtual X server
 Xvfb :1 &
 # Keep the process ID
 XPID=$!
 # Run PrestoDecom on the new virtual display
 ./<binary-name.lnx> -display :1 -commandfile <your-command-file> -noshow -exit
 # Stop the virtual display
 kill $XPID

To install Xvfb on your system if it is not already available, please contact your system administrator.