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Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall
HardcoreGamer writes "An Oregon amateur rocket group, the Portland State Aerospace Society, plans to launch a Linux-powered rocket weighing 12 pounds to 55,000 feet at a speed of Mach 3 in September, Wired News reports. The rocket's onboard computer is an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board along with a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. The group will present a paper (HTML | PDF ) on the use of free software in rocketry at Usenix 2003. The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"
I guess this redefines the term "crash."
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
Do you really want to have to pay royalties to SCO on your rocket? There are high-quality commercial embedded OS's without much clearly defined IP rights, and no such liability issues, and I think its a good idea to go with the Gartner recommendation and avoid the potential legal issues with Linux for the time being.
Imagine a Beo- aah, forget it.... :-)
Huxley
PS please don't hurt me...
and of course this will just encourage those rascally terrorist who want to build nasty rocketses and blow us all to smithereens. Since now they won't have to pay those pesky licence fees for operating systems for their WMDs.
SCO will probably try to knock it out of the sky with an anti-rocket missle, using a MS-built engine.
Table-ized A.I.
802.11b for data transmission to the ground? I know my 802.11b network doesn't have a range of 55,000 feet.
I think the real question is will the pringles can survive 15 g's for 10 seconds?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
But, I gather the greatest stresses will be on the computer hardware, as 10 G's will put a meaningful load on the parts, not to mention vibrational loads. And rockets are difficult to begin with. Here's hoping it works.
I want a wifi card with that range!
didn't those 586s have no math co procs?
No, terrorists have to use Windows for their Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then, they only have to invoke a BSOD.
Fight Spammers!
No matter how fast you've hand tuned your kernel, Linux at Mach 3 is fast as shit.
Bush: linux can be use to launch rocket? The very thing that terrorist lacks? It's free and distributed widely on the Internet? We got a problem here Ashcroft: not only that, but its source code is not encrypted, anyone could store a copy in their compueter. Bush: Then I'm assuming that even if we EMP all the computers, the source might still be stored somewhere as a printed copy? Ashcroft: I'm afraid so. I always have a problem tainting uses of technology Bush: then let's ban printers as well, that will buy you sometime.
Ours is bigger.
--Just the place for a snark!
how fast will the rocket be able to do "apt-get dist-upgrade"?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Wow, Linux gets more and more elaborate every day! An OS can provide the thrust for rocket engines and then some!
Can I get it to do my dishes and laundry for me too?
But as previously posted, what OS has been guiding rockets? Wind-SCO-s?
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Heck, I'd worry about the CF card. I doubt it's a hard disk (of the spinny-type) as the paper states, as that'd crash on either liftoff or chute deployment. I'd bet it's a flash-type, just like a simple camera memory card. And then I'd wonder whether it'd survive too. Many of them have altitude restrictions (though I seriously doubt they're for real - it's probably a "don't use this in an airline design!" warning) as well. Remember to put some sort of retaining mechanism on the CF slot. Wouldn't want the card pulling out on liftoff, now would you. :)
Yipes. High-altitude, high stress stuff is always a pain (which is why aerospace companies make so much money designing things).
It'll definitely be cool to see if this works. The paper's a little light on details of the design (for certain things - like the actual construction or parts choices - for other things it seems pretty detailed).
10g is not a lot of acceleration for electronics, as long as large components are securely fastened (even with tie-wraps), and there are no moving parts.
The only non-solid-state parts on the design are the connectors, which can handle hundreds or thousands of g's of acceleration without "bouncing" on the pins.
PC-104 is designed for high-stress applications such as this.
...that my design documents aren't the only ones that look like this.
MS are great. Linux is crap.
Now simply ride the flames that come out the back of that.....
Aim for Redmond, guys.
Bowie J. Poag
So it's guided by Linux software, who cares? Is /. so enamored with Linux that it hypes anything that uses Linux even if it doesn't do anything else special? The rocket itself isn't a technological leap. But put Linux on it and gee... it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Linux: light years ahead of Windows. Literaly!
As others have pointed out, it is not *linux* powered. But now thanks to Ashcroft and his straight man, bin Laden - anyone using model rocket fuel is considered a terrorist threat. So, not only is not linux powered, it probably won't be powered at all.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
prrreecccioussssss pppproppulsion corporation, y-e-s-s-s-s-s-s-s
Assuming that this rocket finds aliens, is there a way for them to get the source code? Abduct the developers, perhaps?
"and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage."
:)
Call me an english troll, but considering this rocket only goes to 55000 ft - why would they use the term "long term storage"? Has quality on storage media gotten so bad that "long term storage" is measured in minutes!?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! No no, hear me out! If we get 16 of these together, according to my math, we could reach the moon in 129.6 minutes! Take that, NASA! Okay sorry, I'm going now.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Sure the OS may be a version of Linux, but the really interesting part is that they've found a way to harness all of that heat from the AMD to get the rocket that far up!
:)
Talk about potential for burn up on reentry though.
but can it run teh netbsd?
If this is just a standard stripped debian distro, then there is no patch/special RT linux version running. This seems to be a one-run, let it fly kind of setup.
Not something for extended type, geosyncronous/etc flights like someone else mentioned. I think you'll need something with a tad more precision and "predicability" for more intense missions.
I'm not saying you'll need to re-write something like lynxos or any other rt unix based system...but standard debian might not cut it?
Just a thought.
THE ROCKET IS POWERED BY COMBUSTIBLE FUEL! LINUX IS NOT A POWER SOURCE!
Through your usage of capital letters, I have become a wiser man.
Smart ass comments aside, I agree with your point. Obviously, they're using the meat of a penguin who - by the cruelty of his Geek master - was named 'Linux'.
Image a beowulf cluster of these.
I was about to ask what the specific impulse of Linux was and if it changed from Intel to AMD to PowerPC. And if NASA knows about it. Heh...Imagine a Beowulf BOOSTER of those.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Aww c'mon, they've only Linux. Not as if installing Linux is rocket-science...
More than mere navel gazing.
What would RIAA do if a satellite full of
mp3s was launched with easy access for everybody ?
>"..free software in rocketry"
6 to 1 odds that such software would be classed as restricted.
where can I download the source code? IIRC, the GPL mandates that the source be availible to everyone.
During system installation, it's important to use the right networking packages, to cope with the slightly nonstandard hardware. At the bash prompt, type:
% apt-get skynet
I know you're jocking, but you wouldn't believe how many users make that mistake. We double the number of CPU on a box, and the users always ask "so, are things going to go twice as fast now ?".
I used to try to explain that all processes have to be separated in what can be parralelised, and the part that is serial and can no advantage of multiprocessors... Now I go straigth to: If you can harvest your field in 9 days with one combine, then you should be able to harvest it in 1 day with 9 combine - but 9 women won't be able to produce a baby in 1 month...
That usually get them thinking, and I don't get any more question !!
http://cvs.psas.pdx.edu - Have fun!
... have been doing this for awhile. The PC104 stack in their VTVL rockets/crafts have always been linux kernels.
He's also been using 802.11 for communications.
His laptop control station is win32 though.
ArmadilloAerospace
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Isn't this considered a Missile? Even if it only goes straight up and back down? Isn't guidance of a "Rocket" prohibited? I hope I'm wrong but...
Lemidan
You should have seen what I did to my network card after it stopped working! Amazingly, after an approximate 20G throw against the wall, it started working again!
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
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And watch it blue screen and plummet into the ground.
"Hit any key to continue..."
*Zoooooooom*
Booom
Yes the sound effects needed
I use ugly punctuation and styling to offend as many as possible.
[cx]
From the story: "The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"
It will if it is embedded in epoxy.
Oh the shame, caught in the act. I'm guilty of snide remarks about a topic that's actually important.
:) - want a pretty good amateur avionics system that eventually will be capable of active guidance? Heck, you could lose the fins and get another few thousands feet.
Let me extend your comment with a concern of ours: the lack of technical collaboration between amateur aerospace groups.
When we started PSAS, there was very little posted on advanced amateur rocketry (especially avionics). Now there's a lot more, but for some reason many amateur aerospace groups either:
1) feel their technology is good enough to be proprietry (i.e., closed source), or
2) or they're too lazy to post their results.
Either way, the community loses and we have to slog through all the stupid mistakes in order to recreate what they've done.
This is incredibly frustrating - so when we started PSAS one of our goals was to always post everything we learned. We're open source, open hardware, and more importantly, open to the community: we're trying to collaborate with as many amateur groups as we can (in fact we've currently got collaborations going on with two other universities).
In fact, you should be able to recreate _everything_ we've done by following our history and getting the technical details (schematics, firmware, software, system diagrams) from our site.
So, to the BYU people with a _much_ bigger rocket
Contact us, let's collaborate.
Through your usage of capital letters, I have become a wiser man.
Hey, if they don't understand you... talk slowly and loudly until they do! That's what Homer Simpson says, anyway! ;)
(and it is funny, by the way), but this attitude is not far from the truth. I happen to be a member of Tripoli (one of the associations that governs high power rocketry) and we currently have a letter writing campaign going on. The government is trying to make it harder for us hobbyist to get engines over certain power ratings. I guess they fear someone using these engines to power guided rockets. This is kinda silly, as most terrorist have access to better weaponry, ie Stinger missles. Of course, the gov is also afraid that the terrorist do all there planning on the internet, too.
...2...1.... LAUNCH!
Oh shit... sorry guys, gotta start over. I had the caps-lock on.
"Derp de derp."
Debian/RTLinux for flight control, the AMD 586 for less heat, and it looks like the info will be published after Usenix. Pretty nice.
Of course, the banner for the second page was an ad for MS.
modprobe: Can't locate module podbaydoors
They also have to comply with U.S. export laws (International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 CFR 120-130) that require an export license for missile technology. That trumps the GPL. You can get in serious trouble if you ignore the law.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
poor lycoris ;-)
First of all, the techs will spend 3 weeks just trying to install Linux. There won't be a single driver that's compatible, and the few that exist will be buggy. Each different tech will want a different version, one wants NASA-Linux, another wants Goddard-Linux, and they all will be uninstalling the previous install and secretly putting their own distibution on it. If they ever settle on one install, then they will discover there's no applications to run, except Windows versions. Finally they'll get fed up with it and just put OSX on.
No, this is just part of our nefarious plan to make Linux-powered ICBMs.
Nukes we won't be able to manage, but a passel of penguins "down South" will be lobbing icebergs at Redmond any day now.
In which case they will be "ice-BMs".
Ick. I don't believe I just wrote that. Please mod me down (-1, Dumbshit).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
1) Create Linux Rocket
2) All your base are belong to Linux
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!!
The Norwegians have a Penguin rocket!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Just imagine a MIRV cluster of these!
Wah!
I think a bigger concern would be whether the connectors are properly held together and maintain electrical connection. The boards should be fine.
You can find lots of DEBI info by looking through the past two weeks of my journal. You'd have to follow links from my web page link below in my sig. I won't link it directly since the machine will probably tank after only a few concurrent connections.
Who can be the first to get Linux out of the Solar System? (R.I.P. Pioneer 10, 1972-2003)
If the experiment ends successfully, maybe NASA can replace their windows CE operating system they've been used to power their pocketpc.
It's not the speed, it's the rate at which the speed decreases. A book hitting the floor does not undergo an acceleration of 1G. It's many times that. I'm pretty sure our wireless-disaffected friend refers not to the acceleration his (her) card underwent as (s)he threw, but when it HIT THE WALL. That could have been thousands of Gs, if only for a very brief moment. Don't call bullshit when you're wrong, darnit!
"Optical sensors, such as star and horizon trackers, may be used to compute attitude. "
hmm.... using optical sensors to compute attitude.
that should be interesting, although i don't know why they couldn't determine that before take-off.
I have to wonder if 802.11b is really all that great of an idea for this. A person could build a jammer for $5 in radio shack parts that would crash this thing.
Gah, Soft-Realtime on Linux is a Pain (Diaries)
By Delirium
Tue Jun 10th, 2003 at 10:14:01 PM NZDT
I would've thought Linux would be better in terms of scheduling latency than WinXP, but it turns out it's on the order of 10-15x worse in the default setup, which is pretty annoying. What's more annoying is that it's not possible to cleanly fix. Details inside.
What I need is a thread that polls a queue every 2ms. It has to be semi-reliable, but not hard realtime -- it can take 3m, it can take 1ms, it can take 4ms. It should usually take 2ms though, or as close as possible. WinXP does this fine -- you Sleep() for 2ms, and it wakes you up pretty reliably 2ms later, you poll, then you Sleep() for another 2ms. When the polling thread is set to high priority (which is fine since it spends 95% of its time sleeping anyway) jitter on this is in the 1 ms range (i.e. it almost always polls in 1-3ms intervals).
Linux, on the other hand, has a timer with a granularity of 10ms (on i386). This means that if you nanosleep(2000000), you sleep for 10ms, not 2. If you set the process to realtime priority (SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR), nanosleep() hacks around this by intercepting sleeps =2ms and busy-waiting on them instead of blocking. Now this works fine if you're doing a series of precise hardware controlls (say you want to send 10 pulses in 500-μs intervals), but it works terribly for indefinite polling, because it degenerates to indefinite busy-waiting, which I could've coded myself with a for(;;) loop. What I want is it to almost always be asleep, but to reliably wake up every 2ms and poll.
And no, the low-latency patches don't help. What the low-latency patches do is reduce scheduling latency so that a process (especially a realtime-scheduled one) wakes up very soon (on the order of 100μs-1ms) after it unblocks. However, the timer still has 10ms resolution. So the process will wake up as soon as the timer fires, but the timer won't fire more than once every 10ms, which doesn't really solve the problem. This can be changed by modifying the HZ kernel constant (which is set to 100 on i386, leading to the 1/100 = 10ms granularity). Unfortunately, this apparently is recommended against by many people, as *lots* of places in the kernel refer to HZ, and nobody's gone through to make sure alternate values will work alright. It also increases overhead considerably because a lot of other stuff tied to HZ will run more often (that doesn't really need to), and timeslices will be reduced as a side effect (unless you muck about still more with the kernel source code manually). All this because I want timer interrupts with better granularity.
And even if changing HZ weren't problematic, I don't want to write software that requires my users to jump through hoops to use it. Especially when it runs fine on stock WinXP of all things. It's not going to be a great selling point for Linux if I have a crossplatform app that says "download and run" for Windows and has 4 pages of instructions for how to run it on Linux.
So currently I've given up on getting good timer resolution under Linux and am trying to avoid having to have it. This requires a library I'm using to add blocking reads though (right now it only has non-blocking reads with a "data ready" flag). If that's done, Linux is pretty good (esp. with low-latency patches) at waking up high-priority processes right away when things unblock. But it can't poll regularly at small intervals. Bah. Hopefully the library maintainer will agree to add blocking reads to his library, as I really would like to have a cross-platform app and not be stuck with using WinXP.
Not sure if they tested for this but if they didn't I think this particular rocket might not go too far.
Now imagine a bewoulf cluster of these...
"This is certainly a brave approach that throws everything we thought we knew about building a rocket" said NASA Ames' deputy director for research, G. Allen Flynt. "It shows that we've being doing it all wrong for years, trying to build ever more powerful, more efficient rocket motors, when the real solution was staring us in the face; Replace the expensive rocket motor with a cheap commodity PC running GNU/Linux. Brilliant. My hat goes off to these guys"
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
* it's coordinates would be sane by default
* it would weigh less ( no needless bloat )
* via propolice, buffer overflows ( explosion of rocket fuel ) would be far less likely to result in a rooted rocket
How much will travelling at Mach 3 affect the frequency of the 802.11b signal received at ground level?
15G is nothing - that's like dropping the card onto carpet from about 2ft. Not exactly stressful for some solid state hardware - even a hard drive could probably cope with that while running. The duration doesn't make much difference - providing they don't exceed the amount of G required to break something (probably more like 80+G). The vibrations might cause the G level to peak much higher than the overall accelleration of the rocket however.
I would have thought that vibrations are much worse than the overall acceleration of the rocket; Anyone ever taken a computer out of the back of a car (which probably never exceeds 1.5G) only to find that some screws have come loose or a PCI card has fallen out? (cos I have!).
that if (Linus Forbid) it ever crash and burns, on whose head should it fall (Insert the name of **AA honcho, WorldCom/Enron/M$/Oracle executive, Political figures such as the three monkeys (Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft) etc...
I would definitely vote for Cary Sherman..Damn She-bitch's cold!
Rapid Nirvana
NEWS JUST IN---->The RIAA has sued the makers of said rocket, as the 802.11b link could "techinically be used to share illegal files accross the network".
At mach 3, won't the doppler effect change the frequency of the radio signal so such a degree that the receiever won't be able to communicate with the rocket?
Since we're talking about rocketry, I think we should be using sensible units, not these so-called "feet".
FYI: 55000 feet are 543 femtoparsecs, or 1.77 picolightyears, or 112 nanoastronomicalunits.
Or 16.75 kilometres, while we're at it.
I though the first linux powered rocket took flight 2 years ago...
I remember they used the jumptec 386 dimmpc and used ham radio packet on 144/440mhz to get telemetry up/down.
I know I saw it here. Can anyone find it?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Paint on the side... "Try and examine the code on this SCO" :)
Linux really is rocket science.
But Does it run *BSD??? :)
now seriously.... imagine a MOSIX cluster of those...
would it be a MIRV?
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
We will need to apply a few patches to make this work right.
1) Fix pesky bug that keeps sending rocket into orbit instead of its intended target in Redmond, WA
2) Install Beowolf Cluster munitions warhead
3) Profit!
Would a Beowulf cluster of these be called a MIRV?
The Komet was probably not powered by linux either. (Details of the fuel, etc. are provided by the link)
I can see my /home from here!
A little known fact, the rocket is actually powered by the excess heat from the AMD chip.
What signature defines me as a person?
...if SCO says it can!!!
SCO RULES!!
PC104 is NOT a good bus for hard real time applications. It hasn't got enough bandwidth or interrupt support. Couldn't they at least go PCI or CPCI?
Maybe it's not so bad. It sounds like all the mission critical I/O is on the CPU board, so it doesn't go through that damn bus. But even so, it makes me wonder about their thought processes. Maybe it'll work. But if it does, it won't be because of PC104. It'll be despite it.
PC104+ is a stupid kluge. Adapting an architecture from the IBM PC-AT to a class of applications it was never intended for. PC104+ is to hardware what Windows CE is to operating systems.
Oh well. At least they're not using Windows CE.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
Finally, somebody gets an AMD to run at a high speed.
what's next, linux drivers for cars ?
Did some twisted person configure bash to masquerade as C-shell?
... would this be able to reach Mars?
How do you know, are you www.soreass.com?
I'm not sure what the probability of a logic flip is, given the die size and the length of the mission. But how will the software hold up to these random changes?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
All an OS kernel does is provide some very basic services: task switching, memory management, process starting and stopping, simple interprocess communication, and device drivers. That's it really. That's why you traditionally don't see large operating systems (like Linux, BSD, and Windows) used in safety critical embedded applications: in exchange for the few services the OS provides you, you're using a giant blob of software that's much larger, and potentially more complex, than the rest of your application.
In short, I'm not sure why these stories get people all excited. Does it really matter that it's the Linux kernel in there, as opposed to some other, even open source, kernel? It's more the mindset of "Linux, Linux, Linux!" I think.
"The U.S. Department of Defense today said that they had infiltrated a homegrown terrorist group who was attempting to create a SCUD missile for "nefarious" purposes.
"Asked to comment on the action, the defense attorney for the suspects screamed, "It's a SCO'd missile, you dimwits, SCO'd, not SCUD!
"A spokesperson for SCO replied, 'In light of recent development, we have discovered we own all rights to space travel and we fully expect to cash in on this one. Yeah baby!'"
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
>>>The real question is whether their network
>>>card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!
No, the real question is what use will they get out of 802.11b once the rocket is out of range?
With their stated goal of 55,000 ft altitude, they'll be without a WLAN connection for approximately 54,500 ft of the journey.
Omni antenna about 500-1000 ft. Directional? Yeah, they are going to manually point the antenna at the rocket.
Sounds like someone isn't thinking.
10 MD
I am sick of people thinking that Linux is lacking in drivers! All of my hardware works, period.
Try running windows on a Sun or Macintosh, see how well the drivers stack up then! We all know that a window sure as hell won't survive the G-Force.
To get this back on topic: Can an 802.11b card really reach the ground? I seem to remember that space is more than 300 feet away.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
These rocket trips are one way. They ain't coming back. If NASA had to pay Windows liscensing fees for each rocket piece that floated off into space or crashed into the ocean after takeoff, well, there'd be one more reason we unfortunately aren't getting to Mars anytime soon.
It doesn't mean much in my estimation. It's not like Linux is a unique or especially cost effective solution here.
It seems like one could put any combination of off-the-shelf PC hardware and software together in a box and blow it to kingdom-come.
To me, it's like if they used duct tape to put it together and went around saying "Powered by Duct Tape!"
I'm much more interested in scenarios that make you think, "Wow, without Linux that would be impossible or impractical."
I would've thought software would clog the turbopumps.
... if you meant potting the electronics into a solid epoxy block, but it would probably be light enough if you just soaked the items in fairly runny epoxy and let the rest run off.
How fast would this thing have to go for its transmission frequencies to phase shift into something the reciever can't pick up? Do they have any concerns about that?
THIS JUST IN:
man to use linux powered dildo to reach all the way to the top of his colon!
The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux
I'm hoping this isn't someones attempt to help the rocket reach a higher altitude by keeping the weight of the software down.
Cheers.
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
Great way to get back at SCO. Remove the code in question from the Linux kernel and put that kernel on the rocket. Fire it so it flies over SCO and when a kernel panic or something happens because of that removed code, the missile falls "harmlessly" on top of the SCO hq. Then you can just shrug and say: Eh, I guess you were right all along... Oh well.
Totally Life!
ALL replies
#launch -v 10 Launching in 10 seconds... Launching in 9 seconds... Launching in 8 seconds... Launching in 7 seconds... Launching in 6 seconds... Launching in 5 seconds... Launching in 4 seconds... Launching in 3 seconds... Launching in 2 seconds... Launching in 1 second... Kernel panic: CRC error 11 telnet: remote host disconnected [root@mybox#]
Computer Geek Proverb: Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
Somehow I don't think that 802.11b will get much data sent back. Maybe for the first .1second.
:/
Also I had an AMD 586, not the most x86 compatible chip
-- taking over the world, we are.
Having done that I known that writing flight code is HARD - not because the basic flight profile code is hard - for high power rockets it's not - it's hard because 95% of your code is error handling code that's hard to test - you don't even need a chunky cpu unless you're going to be doing real-time guidance sort of stuff - we used 8051s - the sort of thing that goes into toasters (but then 'cheap' was important to us - Murphy loves rockets - flight computers have to be easy to replace)
no doubt powered by gentoo :) (at least it'd better be...)
We don't use the main bus for critical communication. There is a CAN bus on the motherboard which we use to communicate with the PIC microcontrollers. This bus is designed for real-time prioritized communication between embedded components, which is why it is used in modern automobiles.
This is a volunteer low-budget project, so cost is an issue. The PC104 board we chose is a good compromise between cost, ease of development, and functionality.
I'd rather you made the joke about falling blue water from airplanes (icy BM's)
Fie! How could I have missed THAT pun?!?
I bow before your superior (if anonymous) pundacity.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Mmmmmm. War orbiting. Sounds very cool.
p.s. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Yeah, that's the idea. Just a coating thick enough to lend stiffness to anything that doesn't like force. Might have to do two coats.
Of course, it is necessary put the card in a vacuum and draw out the air somewhat before coating. That eliminates the bubbles.
Tux in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace.
(With apologies to Jim Henson.)
Of course a network card will withstand 15g's. As for the antenna, that's a different matter. However, at mach 3, that rocket's going to be well out of transmission range awfully quickly!
Of course, you can try using more directional transmitters - but if you go TOO narrow on the beam, then you lose reception if the rocket tilts even a small amount.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
That way if SCO goes after you you can say, "Come up here and get me!"
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I have a flight computer that runs on Windows 98. Pentium class 533MHz processor. 1G HD and 128Meg flash drive.
You can find it here.
And if there is an issue I can really say my computer 'crashed'.
RDH8
I'm just afraid this will catch on and suddenly every dateless geeky 15 year old will attempt to launch a 12 lb rocket to space that become falling missles of doom.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
where on the rocket is there going to be room for the fat, smelly, linux/unix geek?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
people are sayinig things about outer-space radiation and things like why specially-made software is better for maintaining an orbit. lets get a couple things straight. its going straight up and straight down (no orbit there) up to 55,000 feet (about 10 miles). the space shuttle orbits at 250 miles, for comparison. considering that and the fazct that most aircraft cruise at 35,000 feet with no problems for the laptops inside, radiation seems like a minor problem. yes, it could be a problem in the furure, but that has nothing to do with the current project.
...no one can hear your kernal panic!
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
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