Blog 2017 03 03 Winter
We now have a final design of the patch for our entire team. A final design of the t-shirt logo is going to be up soon as well. Now that we have the magnetometer with the GPS, gyroscope, and accelerometter we have to finalize everything with the ECE Team. Unfortunately things have been going back and forth about what is going to be happening. Floats or integer values and how they will be manipulated before they are stored to make sure we are able to get the most out of the data. Until all of that is finalized I can not make changes to fit with the data entirely. Currently I have terrain data working for Oregon at a high definition.
While waiting for the ECE team to finalize everything, I may work on optimizing the code that I currently have for the WebGL and the layout of the website. Since there is a sustain-er and booster, data will be provided for both but they will not have exactly the same protocols.
The main problem is that the communication protocol is not staying consistent.
While working on the recovery part of the server if it crashes we were going to have two separate issues one if we lose power and it reboots. With Linux the setup we should be able to do it in one set of code the way the reboot code is. Whether the we lose power or the server crashes it should follow this same code.
I am going to boot up or server and try to start testing as much code as possible on the Linux machine that Mr. McGrath gave us. That way we can see how this is going to work since Linux is the operating system we are using and we will be able to see more errors that we might not see on a windows machine. Hopefully also we can get this machine to be our main machine instead of having pieces working on everybody's computer. This way we can see the software coming together in one piece.
I was not able to test both this reboot code and our node start code at the same time because of my windows machine.
This week we worked with the ECE team to figure out some inconsistencies with the telemetry protocol. The things we figured out will actually make implementing the protocol much easier. For example, the original protocol specified 16-bit floating point numbers (half precision floats), but there are no libraries that I could find that work with half precision floats. Also, I learned a lot about the USB protocol this week, and feel confident that I can proceed with the final implementation of the telemetry reader. Additionally, I will research the viability of using my personal Arduino device to create a telemetry mocker to test the system with.
This week I will finish the telemetry reader, and it will hopefully work with the output of the ECE team's groundstation. I'm not too worried because everything in computer science usually works on the first try. That was sarcasm. It does not. When I am done implementing the protocol, we will need time with the actual hardware to identify and fix any bugs.
Originally I planned to use a second Raspberry Pi to send mock USB data to the first Raspberry Pi which is running our software. However, I this week I learned about the USB concepts of "hosts" and "devices". A computer, like a Raspberry Pi, is typically set up as a USB host, which you can connect devices too. There is no easy way to hook two hosts up. I believe that I can use my Arduino to act as a device instead of a host, but I will have to research that over the next week.