Oh the shame, caught in the act. I'm guilty of snide remarks about a topic that's actually important.
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:) - 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.
That's right, the standard kernel doesn't cut it... it's not real time. When we care about control issues and other non-prototyping issues, then we'll patch the use RTLinux from FSM Labs. We've written our flight computer software so it's pretty easy to port over (named pipes between processes).
Slashdot Mirror
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.
http://cvs.psas.pdx.edu - Have fun!
That's right, the standard kernel doesn't cut it... it's not real time. When we care about control issues and other non-prototyping issues, then we'll patch the use RTLinux from FSM Labs. We've written our flight computer software so it's pretty easy to port over (named pipes between processes).
Ah, but does size matter? Or brains? You decide ;)
http://avionics.psas.pdx.edu/
http://psas.pdx.edu/psas/Current_project/INS/INS_H ome.html