Now that Ubuntu 10.10 is out I am slowly upgrading my computers one by one. Today it was time to perform the upgrade on my newest (in terms of technology) and most bad ass computer, the Acer Aspire 5745G Laptop. I have previously written about running Ubuntu 10.04 on it, which was the first Linux OS I have installed. Already with Ubuntu 10.04 everything was working and only the Ethernet interface required manual installation of driver. Installing Ubuntu 10.10 was a simple matter of performing the upgrade from within the package manager.
Month: October 2010
Automatic update in the sky at a glance view
The Sky at a glance time line view in Gpredict 1.3 is updating itself as time passes. This video demo shows this feature in highly throttled simulated real time mode as well as in manual time control mode.
NOAA 18 and 19 APT images Sunday, 17 Oct 2010
A few APT images received from NOAA 18 and NOAA 19 yesterday. THe setup I used was the very same that I have described earlier. Click on images to see full resolution and image details.
Gpredict 1.2 released
After one year of development, bug fixing and testing we have decided that it was time to make a new release of Gpredict. This release features several new features such as the rewritten layout engine as well as lots of bug fixes.
Gumstix OVero Fire and Tobi after the crash landing
As I mentioned last week, the Gumstix Overo Fire COM and the Tobi expansion board looked surprisingly well after the crash landing of the failed rocket. Yesterday, I have had a chance to take a closer look at the boards and see what damage has occurred to them. Once I separated the two boards from each other it was obvious that the 70 pin AVX connectors were damaged on both board. The electrical connections on the Gumstix Overo Fire are still OK despite the damaged connector, but the Tobi board got damaged beyond repair (PCB tracks ripped off). Below you will find some close-up photos and a video about the damaged connectors.
Successful flight and a crash landing
Oct 3, 2010 – Danish Space Challenge (DSC) held a Rocket Festival at Borris Sønderland, Denmark, where five rockets built by German and Danish students were launched together with one of DSC’s own rockets. For the first time, the DSC rocket was flying an Arduino Duemilanove based flight computer which was responsible for releasing the parachute. This worked well. The payload in the rocket consisted of the digital video recorder built by yours truly, based on the Gumstix Overo Fire embedded Linux computer that I have been blogging about during the last few weeks, see here.
Arduino flight computer
In this video Esben Rugbjerg is demonstrating his Arduino-based flight computer. The flight computer is controlling the igniter for parachute deployment during the descent. After the computer is armed it waits until it registers a large acceleration that corresponds to the launch. After 12 seconds it fires the igniter.
Arduino flight computer
In this video Esben Rugbjerg is demonstrating his Arduino-based flight computer. The flight computer is controlling the igniter for parachute deployment during the descent. After the computer is armed it waits until it registers a large acceleration that corresponds to the launch. After 12 seconds it fires the igniter.
Rocket integration
Wednesday evening the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 UVC camera and the Gumstix Overo Fire based video recorder have been integrated into the rocket. I will not have access to them before the launch day on Sunday. Shown below is the camera and video recorder integrated into the rocket.
Pre-flight mockup
Wednesday, the Gumstix Overo Fire-based video recorder was finally assembled and wired as it would go on the rocket.
