Author Archives: schlassas@carleton.edu

Five days remaining for me, and in the ten since my last writing the GUI has grown to maturity. It displays raw and converted data (and should grow automatically when new strings and fields are added); it displays text alerts … Continue reading →

The python program which will run on Freya is done, tested, and chugging away happily. Yesterday and today I have been working on a dashboard for Tom, of which the very first functional version is now, well, functional. The dashboard … Continue reading →

Today I wrote and tested a DataOutputter class, which was the last piece of the program to be written (short of adding more converter objects, which can happen at leisure). The Outputter receives data one field at a time and … Continue reading →

Today I wrote a script to keep the board’s time accurate, which works as follows: Uses service to pause ntpd to free up the NTP socket. Runs ntpdate with servers ntp.carleton.edu and time.nist.gov. Stores the exit code of ntpdate. If … Continue reading →

One week since my last writing, and the code-scape is looking already very different. I decided today that this was one of those projects requiring at least one rewrite from half-scratch, so  I’ve been refactoring in an effort to fight … Continue reading →

Things are continuing apace. The startup script is written (in bash), and is responsible for mounting the USB, setting system time, running and renicing Core.py, and so on. This necessitated some monkeying around with sudo configurations and fstab, but now … Continue reading →

As of today, most of the code has been written and tested on Freya with a mostly functional big PIC! Error handling and notification was first, and so far mostly involves try-except statements everywhere. There are three levels of email … Continue reading →

I spent the last few days beginning to realize the plan of writing data fields as objects. There are several reasons for this change: Each field needs to have some inkling of what state it’s in so that (eg.) it … Continue reading →

As Doug warned yesterday, it turns out there is a possibility of the board “chopping” the PIC’s data — timing out mid-read and not getting the whole string. Thus far, I have observed this only with a timeout of 0 … Continue reading →

We got our serial port working today, thanks to a mini weather station Tom rigged up. After some brief debugging we were happily sending commands and receiving data. I’ve since tested a number of cases: receiving manually requested data, reading … Continue reading →