Entries for June 2006
NASA Internship: Day 13
Ungh. I've spent hours and hours, days really at this point, pouring over manuals for our FreeWave Transcievers, and the plane OS and c/c++ and I still can't send a message wirelessly. BUT I am getting closer.
Yesterday I went to a coloquium about a corporate space venture company called SpaceDev. The man speaking, James Benson, founded SpaceDev in 1997 and since then they have had a 100% success rate in all their ventures. At least that's what he told us. He layed out in a series of slides a buisness plan and way of thought that matched nicely with my paper The Dawn of the Corporate Space Cowboys. Needless to say I was extremely excited, especially by the videos involving rocketchair descent/ascent to and from the moon!
Next summer internship? Who knows.
Power Glove Tshirt
Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap; I want this.
For those of you out there uncultured enough not to recognize the iconographic game controller depicted amid the four-lightning-bolted (as so pointed out by think geek)tshirt above- it is the Power Glove. The power glove is essentially the predecessor to the newfangled Wii wireless motion controller. It allowed the user to interact with their nintendo using the motion of their hand! Did I mention this thing came out in 1989?
Hand down. One of the coolest toys ever made.
NASA Internship: Day 10
Two weeks down. I have created the architecture for the Wireless Comlink software messaging system. It took pretty much all of today and yesterday to read up on POSIX programming enough to even think my way through the data flow. Want to knw the what parity means? I guess that's why this is NASA, cuz it's hard. I'll probably whip up a digital flow chart on monday when I actually start writing it.
In other news, never forget to write to shmem!
To finish up this week, Eric and I just went 11 rounds in the ultimate fighting arena. That's right, Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Aaaaw yeah.
NASA Internship: Day 8
So today was mostly a thinking day- a day of inward relection, deep thought, and introspection. I'm trying to 'get inside' the plane. That's not easy because it's rather small. Actually, what I mean is that I am trying to write a wrather complicated program, and before I do that I really need to think it through and understand what, how, and when it needs to work.
Oh yeah, and I can now send real ungarbled text across com ports.
NASA Internship: Day 7 : Success at Last!
Today was amazing. The past 7 days of slow brutal trudgery finally paid off as I shattered barriers today. Aaaaaah, the sweet smell of success. Wendel lent me a laptop with a serial port so I could finally test the windows simple serial program I compiled last friday. IT WORKED. I am able to send text messages back and forth across a serial cable from windows to windows.
Additionally, after a sluggish morning, the flaws and intricacies of the QNX IDE parted just wide enough for me to slip by and compile a simple program that opens a port and sends a message out across it. In order to test that program (which runs on the QNX plane PC but is executed from the windows desktop) I have the desktop wired to the plane through a lan crossover cable, and then the plane connected to the desktop using a crossover serial cable. Essentially, I am currently able to send a message from the desktop to the plane across lan, and then back to the desktop over the serial connection. There's a bit of a problem with mismatched baud rates at the moment, but I think that can be ironed out.
And so it begins. I can't wait for tomorrow.
NASA Internship: Day 6
Yeah yeah, I skipped a day. I didn't get much accomplished on friday, in fact I left early. Eric left early also to catch a highschool reunion in Las Vegas and will be back tomorrow. I worked on my little QNX C hack for the comm link with very little fruition (usage?) today. I seem to have hit a bit of a snag with the referencing of libraries using the QNX development platform we have in the lab. Namely, I can't get it to work propperly, or really at all.
I can see how this type of work could get very frustrating. Every minute detail of other minute details takes far more effort then I expect, and thusly far more time. I have only begun to scratch the surface.
In other news (or upcoming events more accurately) I will be exploring the Light Rail system later this evening in an attempt to reach my good friend Paul.
NEW STYLES!
Super luminous velocity has just been updated in the color scheme department. Actually, it's not much of a department, more like a single closet where the color janitor works. He only come in about once a year when i get tired of the color scheme. ANYWAY... SLV has some sweet new colors, but if you want to view it in classic style, simply select "super luminous velocity 1" from the 'Page Style' menu under views in firefox. Otherwise, you're kinda SOL.
NASA Internship: Day 4
FINALLY! After three and a half days of struggling against Microsoft's militant jerkdom, I have a working compiler with a set of libraries capable of communicating with a com port. I have a standard com library I downloaded that comes with examples, so now all I have to do is modify the code a bit for the windows end and write the equivalent version for the other side. That's where the tough part starts because the 'other side' of this comm connection exists on a QNX (pronounced cue-nix) system. So that's a whole new set of stuff to figure out.
NASA Internship: Day 3
Today has been long and frustrating. I again spent most of the day dealing with compiler installation issues. I brought in my personal laptop to work on the serial communications package and : codewarrior didn't work, I couldn't get into the NASA hardwire network, when i finally got Visual Studio Express installed my codewarrior code from yesterday wouldn't compile. Apparently the express edditions of Visual Studio 2005 lack virtually every precompiled header file known to man and all usefull libraries. So that essentially leaves me with tard++. I copied a bunch of headers from the non-working codewarrior's directory, but I still don't have the library for the Microsoft Foundation Classes.
You'd think that somthing with the word 'Foundation' in it would come standard.
Think again. Thanks Microsoft!
NASA Internship: Day 2
Second day down. Actually, that's only partially true; I am about to leave the lab, but about half my day still remains. Much happened yesterday after my posting. I got back to my room, and ambled around for a bit, meeting people here and there, and mooching off of the robotics group's burritos. I sat and watched some other interns play softball while eating said burrito. Eventually I ran into the third Eric who works in the Air Traffic Control department. After some debate, we went expl;oring and found a Safeway to buy groceries at. Score!
Anyway, today I came in and immediately set upon building my map of the system, then I found one already existing and better then what I had planned. Nixxed that idea. So instead I started on the communications package. Spent almost all day trying to get a compiler installed. And eventually got a sample COMM package to compile. Tomorrow I'll try plugging my PC into the plane and making them talk. I hope they play nice.
NASA Internship: Day 1
I'm here. It's 5:30 pm and I am about to leave the lab (my lab!) after my first day fulfilling a lifelong dream: working for NASA. Getting here was pretty rough, I forgot things, and got off to a late start, then got caught in some major construction traffic on 278, but I eventually got to Moffet Field/AMES. Once I had recieved my ID badge, and filled out a ton of paperwork, and checked into my room (which is fairly spartan, but should do the job), I found myself eating at one of two on-base eateries, McDonalds. The excitement I have been feeling for the past month was overwhelming as I sat surrounded by NASA scientists and ate my chicken sandwitch.
When I arrived at Eric Mueller's office (he is my 'sponsor' and essentially co-researcher and boss) he wasn't in, but Ralph, who shares the office with him, chatted with me for a while and then showed me to the lab. This is my lab now. I work here! There will be plenty of pictures taken and posted tomorrow, now that I know that I'm allowed to take them. I read through my QNX Neutrino Realtime Programming manual for a few hours and fiddled with some code, but eventually Eric showed up.
My first task is essentially to develope an encompasing map of the UAV and ground-station hardware/software. Once that is completed, I'll move onto creating a communications package to send data up and down from the plane.
I have a lot to learn.
IG88 Out For The COunt
Sadly, my digital companion and desktop machine IG88 is currently fragged beyond belief. What began a few days before finals as a dead power supply has blossomed into a full on "what the hell is wrong with this thing!".
I replaced the power supply, but not before transfering it back to California in the belly of a Super 80 Airliner where it suffered major hemoraging and internal trauma. The rear fan was jarred loose from its rubber bushings and janggled (techincal term) around the innards of my poor unfortunate box.
Essentially, after replacing the fan, everything was fine for about three weeks untill yesterday when I experienced major video corruption (we've gone plaid!) followed by complete video blackout. The worst part is that I think my PSU is fused to my video card (ATI 9800 All In Wonder). I say that because I have been unable to pry the PSU connector from the board.
This one may be out of my league. I'm bringing it in, after all, I'm just a software guy.
