We met at the Oregon Graduate Institute and attended a lecture on the upcoming Linux 2.6 kernel. You should eventually be able to find the slides of the lecture - which was quite good - at the Portland Linux Users Group web site.
After the meeting we went to the McMenamin's Cornelius Pass Road House for dinner (thanks James, for providing directions) and talked. In summary:
- Yay for us! We launched a rocket and actually got it back (unlike many at Black Rock). We didn't get any avionics up, but that's fine -- it was an airframe-only test. And we still have the coolest avionics of anyone we saw out there. :)
- We need to revamp the architecture of the LV2 avionics and move to a more FC-centric system so the software development can actually help, not hinder, us. For now we're going to stick with the avionics we have now, and just redefine the CAN interfaces so that all the processing is done on the FC. In essence, we'll treat the CAN nodes as hardware interfaces and not as processors. For example, we'll use "virtual UARTs" for the GPS, sending raw UART traffic across the CAN bus with no GPS processing on the GPS PIC. Later, in the next rev of the avionics, we'll just plug the GPS right into the COM port.
- Jamey is the head of the new "software team", which will try to unify all the various software developments going on.
- Wes, who showed up via Nate, might be interested in doing his senior capstone on the redesign of the launch tower computer.
- It looks like we may try to go for an April launch date -- the weekend after spring turn starts (so that we have all of spring break to actually work on the rocket). But, that means a go/no-go decision BEFORE we file the FAA waiver 45 days before the launch (around February 15th).