PSAS/ news/ 2008-07-16 - PLUG meeting talk, Airframe planning meeting, and spin table handoff

Part I - PLUG Meeting talk on Embedded Linux

Josh gave a talk at the Portland Linux User's Group on how we got our MCP5200 PowerPC flight computer to boot Linux. Here are his slides.

TODO: More information from attendees, please!

TODO: Add link to video when it's posted.

Part II - Airframe planning meeting

Tim, Dave, Dan and Andrew tried to do some planning on the airframe, so we started from the launch date and worked backwards:

This gives us about 1.5 months to finish everything, which is not a lot of time for a group of very busy people. So we decided to see what our critical path was. Andrew wasted everyone's time by pulling up TaskJuggler, but we did get an honest-to-goodness preliminary Gantt chart out of the whole thing

Here's a pdf of the Gantt chart, and here's the TaskJuggler source.

The bottom line on the Gantt chart is that we can probably make it, but we have to fast forward development of the nosecone and the recovery system, especially the parachutes.

Finally, note that there's a backup to the BALLs launch, which is 'Rocketober' (sponsored by the Oregon rocketry folks) the weekend of 10/10-10/12 in Brothers, Oregon.

Part III - Spin table handoff

We handed off the spin table to Sean and Ed of the Biomedical Signal Processing lab. They're going to do some testing of accelerometers and gyroscopes for biomedical applications. Not our field, but the work they'll do will help with characterizing our next generation IMU.