tasteslikefire: dude

Sometimes you just wish there was more time ... Tennessee's brainstorm that we launch a SPOT in a weather balloon has taken on a life of its own. Team A51 has gotten into full gear, you can keep up with the very latest here but the basic story is that a bunch of us in the lab have decided to follow in the footsteps of some great experiments in 'edge of space science' ( I just learned that term ) check out some of the links from the google group .. just amazing. Anyhow we are calling our first attempt at this EDGAR-1 , for EDucational Gas-filled Aerial Rotunda, it seems to have caught some peoples imagination with the very latest being an engineer here in the labs who pilots aircraft volunteering with some of his friends, to help us out with an aerial chase vehicle! how cool is that?

The only down side is how much time the project is cutting from some of the other work the team is doing (starting with the solar panel stuff I posted about before ).

This is a shot of the payload, radar reflector and parachute. Lachlan is putting the whole rig together.

Here's a quick snap shot of some of the things that we are attaching to the SPOT, still working through the code but we are using a custom daughter card that Tennessee made to control a camera via some TTL output pins, taking reading from a pressure sensor connected to an SPI ADC, and finally using the UART module on the arm9 to communicate with a Telit GSM/GPS module ( which is a super cool module ), there is also a MB of flash on there where we are recording our sensor readings. ( I apologize for all the acronyms, but thats just how things go sometimes )

I snuck a picture of Tennessee and Lachlan working on getting our GPS and the MicroTrak talking to each other properly, so that we can track our payload using the amateur radio network.

If you just cant wait to take a look at the code you can get it here , in the directory named 'Edgar', but just after the launch we will move it into its own project at java.net called spot-balloon.

Going to be launching aweather balloon on saturday, things are a bit behind schedule yet, but that seems the way of things around here :)

We always pull it off anyway ...

So these weather balloons are super cool, you can take snapshots from 20Km+ altitudes, which are spectacular, check out some of the links that can be found at http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Mobileandembedded/Ninety9SpotLuftBallons

Dont miss the video at the bottom :)

Here's a pic from the night some of the guys worked on getting the payload together, check out some more on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/25109749@N03/

Ill try to get some more good shots tomorrow, gonna be another work night :)

So we've been working on installing our SPOTs out in the parking lot, sure that doesnt sound glamorous but let me tell you ... yeah ok, not glamorous, but we are _totally_ saving the planet. You know what they say, one parking lot at a time.

Anyhow, here are some pics of the panels that we are trying out, advice is welcome, we do have a little interface board which charges a pair of super caps from the panel and then offloads that to the SPOT once the charge is sufficient. Ill post more about that later, and some of the results too.

If your interested some of us interested folks are discussing this stuff over at http://yggdrasil.dev.java.net.

Here at the labs we are mostly just measuring the performance of the panels right now.

This is a picture of a commercial product we are trying out, the Solio, cool stuff but we had to hack the button to make it do what we wanted.

This is the 'benchmark' we're using, a 10 watt panel, attached to the supercap board I mentioned before.

This is a picture of the benchmark panel out in the marsh, which is right outside of our parking lot, see saving the planet. Told you.

Trying to use ecto, from infinite-sushi.com, looks cool so far ...

just for the sake of testing a pic, this is a shot that Derek just posted to flickr of the OLED spot board that we made here a while ago

Hello again, so Im getting totally jealous of davidS and his crazy blog skillz , so Im gonna try to get back into it.

I've been trying to get Yggdrasil up and working lately, with help from Lachlan ( he's supposed to blog too, so check here lachlans blog)

Anyway we've been recreating a bunch of lessons learned on our own and others peoples projects to get Sun SPOTs working as a proper wireless sensor net. Exciting stuff actually and the latest is that we've got a spot out in the marsh around our campus reporting back values on the solar panel that is attached to it.

Soon as I figure out a good way to post pictures here Ill start with that too.

Oh, and just cause its cool check out Tennessee's blog too ( another guy here working on spots ) , his blog is here

cheers

Next in line is team A51. I really do like this idea, think it was partly mine, dont remember exactly though. Anyhow the notion is to have a team of engineers in the lab that do some intense applications of the technology that we work with there. So take some of the ongoing work around the labs and showcase it in real world apps, use best of breed tools to get the job done sorta speak. Yeah, yeah, drank the koolaid, whatever.

So you do some outstanding app, document the whole thing, and I mean the whole thing, how did you choose the app, why is the Labs tech the way to go, what got accomplished, publish the code, and a howto. Make and share all the latest consumer based broadcast media ... blogs, youtube, instructables ... you get the idea, lots of cool stuff out there to tell people about what your doing.

The hope is that while doing this the applications will backfill into the research with some interesting leads, we will be able to present at conferences and the community will enjoy the work being done as well as the documentation of howto's, white papers, source code etc.

so ... comments please.

So thought I might elaborate on the SPOTGrid first, the general thinking is that we are pushing the idea of many of these embeddable computers being used to get some task done, we havent got a simulator yet ( we are working on it, but its slow going, typical resource constraints, nother story nother day ) so provide a bunch of SunSPOTs on some sort of bench so that our developers could try running on a whole bunch of the things all at once without having to buy them all. We are working on it now, and have a 7x7 grid of them up on the whiteboard in the bigroom, Pete just got them up and happy, and the rest of the guys are ready to drop some knowledge on it ... umm ... yeah, well some java anyway. We are working on a remote access scheme, scheduling of interaction time and good way to return results of the run, and we are incorporating all this into, wait for it, SPOTWorld. Thats a tool that has been developed here to work with SPOTs, and even generally with lots of embedded nodes of any type, its a work in progress. anyhow, Ill post pictures of it sometime, check ya later. oh yeah, comments/questions welcome.

My boss tells me that Project Sun SPOT will save the world, and of course I treat it as gospel. Thats right he does read the blog. So Im on the team and we do have a few cool things going on, the biggest new things on the radar are that we are participating in a big push into universities and high schools this year, there is a grid of SunSPOTs up in my lab ( the bigroom for future reference, maybe Ill put a picture up someday ) , and finally an idea Im excited by called teamA51. Hopefully Ill be elaborating on these things in the next few days, Im trying to convince myself to keep up on the blog thing and Im thinkin that small doses is the way to go.