add partial readme

readme.md

@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+# GoTelem: Golang-based telemetry tools
+
+`GoTelem` is a toolkit and library to make working with solar car telemetry
+data fast, reliable, and insightful. 
+
+Features:
+
+- SocketCAN interface for connecting to physical hardware.
+- TCP streaming system based around MessagePack-RPC for LAN control/inspection.
+- XBee integration and control for long-range communication.
+- HTTP API for easy external tool integration.
+
+
+`GoTelem` provides a flexible system for ingesting, storing, analyzing, and distributing
+telemetry information.
+
+
+
+## Rationale
+
+There are probably two questions:
+
+1. Why a telemetry library that runs on an OS?
+2. Why is it written in Go?
+
+To answer the first question, the needs of the telemetry board are ill-suited for a microcontroller
+since it requires doing multiple non-trivial tasks in parallel. The on-car system must ingest
+all can packets, write them to disk, and then transmit them over XBee if they match a filter.
+Doing fast disk I/O is difficult.
+
+There are also significant advantages to moving to using a Linux system for telemetry. We gain
+Wifi/Bluetooth/network support easily, we can integrate USB devices like a USB GPS reciever,
+and we can share common tooling between the car code and the receiver code.
+
+I chose to write this in Go because Go has good concurrency support, good cross-compilation,
+and relatively good performance. 
+
+C/C++ was eliminated due to being too close to the metal and having bad tooling/cross compilation.
+
+Python was eliminated due to having poor concurrency support and difficult packaging/distribution.
+It also lacks a good http/networking story, instead relying on WSGI/ASGI packages which
+make Windows not viable. Futhermore, being dynamically typed leads to issues in asserting
+robustness of the code.
+
+Rust was elminiated due to being too different from more common programming languages. Likewise
+for F#, C#, D, Zig, Nim, Julia, Racket, Elixr, and Common Lisp. Yes, I did seriouisly consider each
+of these.
+
+Go has some quirks and -isms, like lacking "true" Object-Orientation, but the language is designed
+around being normal to look at, easy to write, and straightforward to understand.
+
+Go has really good cross compilation support built in to the `go` binary. However, since this
+package uses some C libraries (SQLite), certain functionality will be missing if you don't
+have a cross-compiler set up. There's a way to make things easier on Linux
+[using `zig cc`](https://zig.news/kristoff/building-sqlite-with-cgo-for-every-os-4cic)
+but this is not usually important since the user can pretty easily compile it on their
+own system, and it's a single executable to share to others with the same OS/architecture.
+
+## Building
+
+There are build tags to enable/disable certain features, like the graphical GUI.