node-red-contrib-tak-registration

A Node-RED node to register to a TAK server, to help wrap and send files as datapackages for TAK, and to create and update markers from json messages.

NOTE: NOT yet for production use.

Install

Either use the Menu - Manage Palette - Install option, or run the following command in your Node-RED user directory - typically ~/.node-red

npm i node-red-contrib-tak-registration

TAK-Registration Node Usage

Registers a TAK gateway node and sets up a heartbeat.

It must be connected to a TCP request node, configured to point to the TAK server tcp address and port (usually 8087 or 8089), set to return strings, keep connection open mode, and split on "</event>".

It can send various types of messages to TAK.

It should be configured with a name, and location.

As it registers to the gateway it should be possible for other team members to send messages and markers to the gateway.

Standard COT event

If the msg.payload is an XML string it will be passed directly though. It should be a correctly formatted CoT XML message of course.

Sending marker position...

To create or update a simple marker send a msg with the following property

• payload - object - a "standard" node-red worldmap format - IE a msg.payload containing name, lat, lon, SIDC or cottype or aistype, (alt), (speed), (bearing), (layer), (remarks), where SIDC is the standard mil 2525C code, eg SFGPU, cottype is the CoT type, eg a-f-g-u, or aistype is the AIS ship type number, eg 80 for a tanker. The layer will get turned into a hashtag which can then be selected on/off in the TAK app layers control, and any remarks will get added to the CoT remarks field. You can also set the icon property to specify one of the inbuilt custom icons if you know the magic iconset codes.

Simple GeoChat messages

requires a msg containing the following properties

• sendTo - string | array - can either be an individual TAK callsign, a comma separted list of callsigns, an array of callsigns, or broadcast to send to all users.
• payload - string - the text of the message to send.

Sending data packages...

requires a msg containing the following properties

• sendTo - string | array - can either be an individual TAK callsign, an array of callsigns, or broadcast to send to all users, or public to just upload the package to the TAK server.
• topic - string - the overall package name - IE what you want it to be called on the TAK device (keep it short).
• attachments - array of objects - each object must contain at least a filename (string) and content a buffer of the file/data, for example [{filename:"foo.kml", content: <buffer of the file>}]
• from - string - (optional) callsign of the person sending the file - defaults to the gateway node callsign.
• lat - number | (string) - (optional) latitude of the marker for the file.
• lon - number | (string) - (optional) longitude of the marker for the file.

If you just need to send a single file then instead of msg.attachments you can use msg.filename to set the filename, and the msg.payload should be a binary buffer.

Sending drawing layer...

The node will also accept drawing type messages incoming from the drawing layer of the node-red-contrib-web-worldmap, and convert them to CoT objects for display. To do this configure a worldmap-in node to pass on drawing layer messages.

Updating the gateway position...

To update the location of the gateway dynamically the node can accept a payload

• payload - string | object - Either an NMEA string starting $GPGGA (for example from a locally attached serial GPS device) - or an object containing only lat and lon and optional alt properties (but no name property).

Details

This should work almost directly with messages received from an email-in node for example - but you will need to add the recipients in the sendTo property and may need to filter out unwanted messages first.

TAK-Ingest Node Usage

This node can accept input direct from a TCP request node, configured to point to the TAK server tcp address and port (usually 8087 or 8089), set to return strings, keep connection open mode, and split on "</event>". This can be same TCP node as used by the TAK-registration node above.

It will produce a well formatted JSON object containing the event. It is returned as msg.payload.event

msg.topic is set to the COT type.

If an event arrives with a fileshare link, it will fetch the file and add msg.filename and msg.datapackage to the output msg. The datapackage will be a buffer.

It can also accept input from a UDP node configured to listen to multicast on group 239.2.3.1 port 6969. The JSON object produced contains similar information but formatted/organised slightly differently. (Very annoying). It is returned as msg.payload.cotEvent