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Archive for July, 2005
July 25, 2005 at 7:01 pm · Filed under Life
We didn’t kill anyone.
We didn’t maim anyone.
We didn’t crash the helicopter.
…
It also never left the ground.
That seems to be the standard response from the CS team (of which I am a part) when asked how the competition went. The last week and a half was not all bad, but I had hoped for more.
The new helicopter we received was actually Bergen’s personal helicopter. It flew fine by itself, but after we loaded it down with all our gear it just couldn’t provide enough lift. After consulting with Bergen and his experts, a fuel change was made and the engine was tuned. This gave us more lift (potentially enough to fly), but by this time it was late Sunday evening and we were to leave early Monday morning. It was too dark to do any more flight testing anyways (despite an impressive array of lighting).
During the days leading up to the competition, the CS team became increasingly frustrated with what was happening. Our software works. We can fly a simulated helicopter. Autonomous hover was just a few hours of flight testing away. But without a working helicopter, our many hundreds of hours of coding can do nothing. This frustration resulted in a less than positive attitude towards other team members, everything mechanical, and the world in general. Tensions were high within the team.
After arriving at Fort Benning, everyone worked very hard on everything that needed to be done. Unfortunately, a last minute problem with the kill switch coupled with the fact that we still needed several hours of flight testing meant that there was no way we could achieve autonomous hover.
Two very good things did happen during the final rush to prepare the helicopter. We discovered an EMI issue with our AHRS unit (which tells us the orientation of the helicopter) that threw the yaw reading way off. We were able to work with a guy from Rotomotion (the company that manufactures our AHRS) and remount the magnetometers further away from the engine, which completely eliminated the interference problems. The CS team also attended an incredible lecture on PID (the mathematical model we use to have the computer correct the helicopter’s flight) use in RC helicopters. The lecture was extremely informative and directly applicable to what we are doing. The speaker taught us several important concepts that will help us further the abilities of the flight program, and also validated almost everything the software team has done to this point. We are in a very good position for next semester.
Ironically, after everyone realized that there was no possible way we could fly, the morale level of the team increased dramatically. We didn’t have to care anymore. :-) So, we had a good time talking with the other teams and watching the competition. Only two teams actually completed Level 1 this year (flying the GPS waypoint course), and no Level 2-4 attempts were made. So, we’re still in the running for next year, at which point we will complete Level 4 and win everything!
The last week and a half in pictures.
July 15, 2005 at 9:08 pm · Filed under Life
I got down to Longview safe and sound (despite spinning a 180 in an intersection in Longview, apparently I’m not quite used to rear wheel drive yet), and immediately started work on coding stuff for Phoenix. Things have been going well on the software side, but there have been a few annoying delays on the hardware side (had to set up a completely new helicopter, and it keeps raining). Lots of stuff to do before we leave early Monday morning.
If any of you are bored and want to see what we’re up to, check out our newly installed live streaming webcam. It only works on Internet Explorer (bleh, ActiveX stuff), and it may only be up sporadically, but here it is: http://remnetworks.org:8008/image1. Try not to keep it up continuously as it eats up a ton of my bandwidth.
July 12, 2005 at 6:10 pm · Filed under Life
I found out yesterday afternoon that the Phoenix team’s only helicopter crashed, leaving us crippled for competition. I was fairly depressed about this turn of events and was not completely sure that I would go down after all. While it would be fun, it’s harder to justify taking off a week and a half of work for what may only be another vacation. While I was still considering my options I worked on finishing the installation of MusicBox (my computer sound system) in Freya. When everything was finally hooked up, I turned the key for a live test. The system powered on, booted, and quietly spoke these words to me, “Don’t loose your nerve.” A sign! Well, actually it’s just because that’s where I happened to have left off in the middle of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” Of course, it’s dangerous to look for signs in random places because the song ends with the comforting wish of, “We hope that you choke, that you choke.” Hmm, can I be selective about my signs? :-)
Anyway, I just found out that the team will likely be getting a new helicopter either tomorrow or the next day, so I am definitely going (although I probably would have gone anyway). Tomorrow morning, I head down to LETU to help the team with the final preperations before the contest, and then it’s off to the contest to see what we can do.
July 9, 2005 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Life
I just got back from spending most of the day at my Uncle’s place helping him get the hay from his fields into stacked bales in sheds. Sounds simple enough, right? Not really. The operation went something like this: a tractor in the front pulled and powered an aging New Holland baler made in 1965, which in turn pulled a trailer. The baler was a surprisingly complicated piece of machinery; it reminded me of the machine that made pies in the movie Chicken Run. And, just like the pie maker, it was not always cooperative. We spent a good part of the day replacing parts that broke and recalibrating the wiring mechanism. When everything worked like it was supposed to, the machine slurped the hay up from the ground, squished it all together, jammed it into a chute, and on the hay’s way out of the chute, wrapped baling wire around it, chopping the ends off and tying them at regular intervals. The end result was a neatly packaged hay bale that needed to go somewhere before the next one shoved it out of the chute and onto the ground. That’s where the people on the trailer come in. The three jobs on the trailer are to yank the bale onto the trailer, retie the ends of the wires (apparently the wire they make today isn’t fully compatible with the old baler), and stack the bale on the end of the trailer.
My job for most of the day was to yank the bale onto the trailer. This involved waiting until just the right time, when the bale was about to come out of the chute, then sinking a large Captain Hook style baling hook into the bale and pulling real hard on it so it would gracefully arc into the trailer for further processing all while maintaining surfer-like balance on the not-so-stable trailer. It wasn’t always graceful and the bales seemed to get heavier as the day wore on. I also spent some time in the shed stacking bales. Luckily, it wasn’t too much time because there was effectively no ventilation and the work was very hard.
It was a good, though tiring, experience, and I learned a lot about the baling process.
July 4, 2005 at 5:40 pm · Filed under Life
Most of my weekend has been consumed with working on Freya. The number of things that could be fixed seems to be endless, but we’re making progress.
On Friday, I finished resoldering the connections on the dash and put everything back in its place. Success! Everything on the dash works as it should now, and there’s even a few nifty features I didn’t know about that started working too. For instance, if I leave the lights on and open the door to leave, not only does it ding at me, but the dash politely asks, “Lights On?”
Also put in the new stereo (a Blaupukt Montreal CD34). I was originally going to for a higher end stereo and bypass the factory amp to drive the speakers directly. Unfortunately, the factory sound system is quite a bit more complicated than I thought it would be. It’s a 10 speaker system and the crossovers are in the factory amp. In order to do a decent job of replacing all that I’d have to spend more than I want to at this point, so I just decided to run the new stereo through the factory amp. The sound I got as a result is good, but could definitely be better. The high frequency response is superb because it’s got some great tweeters, midrange is good, but the bass is somewhat lacking. There’s also a constant low-level hiss from the amp, and because of the strange wiring (common ground is messed up!) I get some interference noise from the electronics in the stereo itself. That said, I really am overly picky about the quality of my sound, it will be good enough for now. Maybe next summer I’ll put in some new speakers, redo the wiring, and add a sub.
On Saturday, my dad finished up the replacement of the water pump, and we took it out for a test drive. We watched the temperature gauge very closely for the first mile or so and everything looked fine, so we relaxed a little. Thankfully the dash was paying better attention than we were when about a half mile later, the engine got extremely hot. “COOLENT TEMPERATURE,” the dash screamed at us! I immediately shut the engine off and pulled over to the side of the road. There was likely a bubble in the system or something, we forgot to check the levels after we took it off the stand it was on. My dad went off to our church (which luckily was only about a quarter mile away) and I stayed with the car. A little while after my dad left, a sheriff’s patrol came up behind me with its lights flashing. My first instinct was to pull over, but I already was, so I just sat there. Really, I expected him to want to help, you know, make sure everything was okay. But he was fairly gruff and questioned me about what was going on, had I sent for help, when was the help coming back. etc. Then he took my driver’s license and went back to his car and spent enough time there that I’m sure he ran my tags and license. After he came back, he was much nicer and told me he’d tell dispatch that everything was okay and to try and get it off the road soon. Later, I figured out why he acted the way he did at first. Imagine if you were the patrol officer and saw a scruffy looking college student with a grease stained shirt sitting alone in a very nice looking BMW that’s over on the side of the road with its hazard lights on. As you get closer, you can see that the shifter box has been torn apart (more on that later), the back seat has been ripped out (that’s how you get to the battery on bimmers), and there are parts strewn throughout the vehicle. I’m sure he thought that I tried to hotwire the car or something! It’s a good thing my name is on the title or else things could have gotten interesting very fast.
Here’s some of the other repairs I completed:
Redid the shifter indicators with a silver metallic sharpie. You’d be amazed how much better it looks now, just like it was brand new again.
Created a replacement shifter cover (bottom of the page) from a $2 Walmart notebook cover. Once again, looks fantastic. Even better than what they originally put on there.
Also put some sewing machine oil on the shifter shaft. The problems with it sticking occasionally seem to have gone away after doing that.
Fixed a broken doorlock bracket. This was a truly evil beast to work on. Trying to move things around inside a door is not fun. Unfortunately, during the process, I scraped up the door handle. :-( But, after we finished everything, the driver’s power lock works now! No more locking it by opening the rear door and reaching from behind! However, both rear power locks still do not work. Maybe some other day…
Right now, I’m prepping MusicBox, so that when the new mounting bracket my cousin is making for me is ready, I’ll be able to put it in. A/C is still not working, we’re thinking either a new clutch is needed or the compressor has burned out. Also, there’s an annoying Pentosin leak in the connection to the ABS accumulator that needs to get fixed.
I’m learning a lot more about the insides of a BMW than I ever thought I would.
Hi there. My name is Curtis Hawthorne, but most of my friends call me Fjord.