Developer guide

Project Elara is a highly-complex project with a codebase of over 40,000 lines of code^[1] spread over 45+ repositories. Developing and maintaining our software and hardware requires continuous contribution and is only made possible thanks to our open-source community. This chapter aims to give a high-level overview of our codebase. Subsequent chapters will go in-depth with details on each repository.

Elara hardware¶

Project Elara’s principal repositories are for its open-source hardware for our self-developed space-based power system design, as given in Table 1.

Elara software libraries¶

Project Elara also has a substantial number of custom libraries, built for scientific computing, graphics, user interfaces, and more, as shown in Table 2.

We often choose to write software from scratch despite there being many industry-standard software, not because we think we can make something functionally superior (we definitely cannot), but because of our unique mission and commitment to the long-term. We want to have our own software that we can share with the world on our own terms (and in particular, with a public domain license), and we want to make our work resilient, minimizing dependencies on external software libraries. The end goal is to make software that could continue to work a decade from now and can be easily stored and archived. In particular, our emphasis on ensuring Project Elara can be rebuilt from scratch via the Elara Handbook means that we must assume that someone doing so will not have the build tools, software libraries, and even potentially operating systems that we have easy access to today. Hence, this fundamentally requires our software to be self-contained and capable of running with minimal (or no) dependencies, stored in a medium that can be distributed with the Handbook and able to last for incredibly-long periods of time.

Elara applications¶

Besides software libraries, Project Elara develops a variety of custom applications, as given by the repositories in Table 3.

Elara websites and documentation¶

In addition, Project Elara maintains a number of websites, including its homepage, and other sites for hosting its research and repository-specific documentation. These are given in Table 4.

Miscellaneous repositories¶

Finally, Project Elara has some specialized repositories that don’t fit into any of the other categories, which are listed in Table 5.