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Blog 2017 03 10 Winter
Added a lot more CSS code to the website as well as some information about the team. This will give a better understanding as to what this software should actually be used for and what we are trying to do. Once I have brief paragraphs about the rest of the sub-teams in the High Altitude Rocketry Team, I'll be able to put that in there as well.
We want begin testing with the actual hardware that will be provided by the avionics team. This will also give me a good idea of what information they are providing so that I know what needs to be displayed in the table. Also, I want to get feedback from the rest of the team about the website so far.
Collecting a large amount of height data is taking a long time. We may just have to make due with what we have now and if we get the rest, use it. Also, the ECE team has been changing up the communication protocol, hopefully for the better though.
I got the Linux computer booted up. I got the reboot etc/inittab working but Al and I were talking about the Upstart portion of this section. I need to figure out how to reconfigure this portion as well so that if it crashes it restarts properly.
I have been and continue into this weekend researching Upstart of Linux. I have to make sure that I have it correct.
The problem with Upstart is that if I mess it up it can cause issues that may cause problems that I may not understand especially since I am a novice with Linux. I have been leaning on my friends that are better at Linux than I am for help and questions. The good thing is that I am really enjoying doing this part because Linux is a lot more flexible than Windows.
This week we finally got the full data flow complete. I used an Arduino to create some mocked telemetry, which is being read by the Raspberry Pi. I can then connect to the Raspberry Pi through a web browser on my PC and see the data coming in. I also created some preliminary error recovery code. If the web server gets an invalid packet, then it will start scanning through the data stream for a valid start byte. It's possible there might be bytes in the middle of the stream that look like start bytes, but actually aren't, so it's possible it might take a few tries to re-align itself to the proper start byte, but it works pretty quickly.
This week I will continue working on the data mocking and error recovery. Additionally, I will work with the avionics team to ensure that the protocol as implemented is correct. We would like to begin testing with the actual hardware that will be provided by the avionics team as soon as it is ready.
I learned some things about USB this week. USB divides things into hosts and devices, and you can't connect a host to another host. This means that my original plan, which involved connecting two Raspberry Pis via USB for testing, didn't work. However, I solved this problem by replacing one of the Raspberry Pis with an Arduino. An Arduino acts as a device, not a host, so it can connect to the Raspberry Pi just fine.
OSU High-Altitude Rocket Team