APRSD Assistant Plugin

The APRS Assistant is an LLM-based assistant for the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS). However, the Assistant can't connect to the APRS IS network on its own -- it needs to live in an APRS server or host.

As the name suggests, this aprsd-assistant-plugin one such host container for the APRSd server. It includes both aprsd and aprs-assistant as dependencies, and should be the only package that you need to pip install and configure to get up and running.

Warning

Like all US amateur radio communications, messages sent via APRS are cleartext and can not be encrypted or obscured. In particular, they are transmit in unencrypted form over the radio airwaves and on the internet via APRS-IS. Sites like aprs.fi aggregate, retain, and redistribute APRS data in searchable databases with multi-year data retention policies. These sites provide a great service to the community -- in fact, APRS Assistant relies on aprs.fi for much of its operation. However, it also means that ALL communications with instances of aprsd-assistant-plugin are public, searchable, and nearly impossible to delete. Treat this service like Twitter, and assume ALL interactions are PUBLIC.

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Installation

pip install aprsd-assistant-plugin

Configuration

APRSd has many advanced configuration options, but only some are relevant for running the APRS Assistant. The following is a minimal configuration for getting up and running. Be sure to write this to the file ~/.config/aprsd/aprsd.conf:

[DEFAULT]
callsign = <YOUR_BOTS_CALLSIGN>
enabled_plugins = aprsd_assistant_plugin.AssistantPlugin

[aprs_fi]
# Get the apiKey from your aprs.fi account here:http://aprs.fi/account
# (string value)
apiKey = <YOUR_APRS_FI_API_KEY>

[aprs_network]
enabled = true

# APRS IS Username (string value)
login = <YOUR_BOTS_CALLSIGN>

# APRS IS Password Get the passcode for your callsign here:
# https://apps.magicbug.co.uk/passcode (string value)
password = <PASSWORD_GENERATED_FOR_BOTS_CALLSIGN>

[aprsd_assistant_plugin]
enabled = true

# (Required) OpenAI API key form making the LLM calls
openai_api_key = <YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY>

# (Optional) Bing API key for web search and new results
# bing_api_key = <YOUR_BING_API_KEY>

Running the Assistant

Once the config file is in place, run:

aprsd server

If you've saved the aprsd.conf file somewhere else, use:

aprsd server -c <path to aprsd.conf>