Tiny Ion Engine Runs On Water

symbolset writes "Discovery News is covering a project by two engineers from the University of Michigan to pair cubesats with tiny ion engines for inexpensive interplanetary exploration. The tiny plasma drive called the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT) will ionize water and use it as propellant with power provided by solar cells. In addition to scaling down the size of ion engines they hope to bring down the whole cost of development and launch to under $200,000."

Comments

cxx stl string c_str() no go mo jo

[Anonymous Coward]

Next line fails so I did the belower code. Do you know why?

//char *strPtr = (char*)(rawDataStr.substr(0, colonIx).c_str());
#pragma meme("for some reaosn, char *strPtr = (char*)(rawDataStr.substr(0, 1).c_str()); does not pt strPtr to first char of rawDataStr")

// I might want to run it through in the debugger to see what is going on with that

string xStr = rawDataStr.substr(0, colonIx);
char *strPtr = (char*)xStr.c_str();
char *endPtr = NULL;
decodeType = strtoul(strPtr, &endPtr, 10);
if (endPtr == strPtr) {  // could not convert (bogus number)
    decodeType = UINT32_MAX;
}

I await for your wisdom.