Mission Control Sim 1 - Speedball-1B

[Brad Luyster]

Went through a very good mission control simulation today which rooted out many bugs, and identified a few areas of focus.  I've created a sim notes page under the White Star google docs.  To note:  This was the smoothest mission control sim ever.  Our new tools and systems have created a balloon which can easily be launched, manipulated, and tracked.

Our single biggest source of instability was the comm controller.  We encountered two comm controller freeze-ups during the sim.  This also allowed us to identify flight computer epoch reset conditions:  The flight computer only resets its epoch when the comm controller freezes up at the same time.  I've added some more debug code to the flight computer which will identify why this is occurring.  If you notice the comm controller freezing up, please grab a snapshot of what the flight computer is doing.

We weren't able to prep a few systems due to time constraints, but all the systems tested performed well.  Here are our findings:

Humidity sensor does not appear to be working.

Ambient Pressure sensor is intermittent at best.

Need to tweak some things on the web page.

Need to flesh out some instructions on the wiki (primarily for resetting web systems).

Need to fix i2c bus freezeups on the sensor controller.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.

-Brad

[Everseeker]

On my end, the new ground support program has stopped actually communicating with any systems.... A problem in my book.
Also, I need to add the preset code, and a raw send box. I need to nail down and eliminate the double space issue on the "combined " window

[Dan Bowen]

Resetting the RTS line on the Sensor Controller serial port using RealTerm on the Payload PC is one way to un-freeze the I2C bus if you see nothing coming from the payload in your ground support terminal.  An alternate way is to close the COM3 arduino window on the Music Loft PC, and REOPEN the arduino Serial Monitor using the button on the right of any arduino window.  I just did this for you on the sensor controller and things came alive for me.  (impressive in-flight wifi on US Airways BTW, teamviewer works fine)

Dan

[stea...@gmail.com]

Splendid job team! Do you think stripping the real checklist down to just the systems involved in the simulation was a good idea? I was hoping it would remove a lot of the stumbling block in moving briskly through the systems checks, and we will add more of the real checklist in as we have more simulations.

I'll try to sync with Chorgy this week to help complete the Comm controller software. I'm going to add a watchdog timer to that code, and we need to complete the real uplink command transfer code. I can't tell yet precisely why the comm ctrlr is freezing, but it does seem to happen when it has to read data from EEPROM during rapid telemetry tx times. Wonder if the FCPU and comm ctrlr are fighting over the eeprom?

Thanks,
Dan

Sent from my iPhone

[Brad Luyster]

The customized check-list was *probably* worth it, but I think we'll only be able to make that call at the end of this thing, comparing man-hours spent vs. man-hours saved.  The new ground support interface was the biggest time-saver.  Hopefully the uplink app is as reliable!

-Brad

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 7:33 PM, D.s. <cho...@gmail.com> wrote:

How easy is it to reproduce the lock up now days?