Safety Software.

If you read my Experimental permit application ….

a)You won’t have insomnia and

b) you will realize that there is a 100% seperate safety computer box.

That safety box has not been necessary to test things up til now.  Now it is becoming the limiting item to be ready to hover. It receives commands from the flight computer, data from the GPS , data from the RC receiver and sends status to the main computer and commands to the catalyst valve.

 

Since this code needs to both be very reliable and well reviewed I’m taking my time on it. At this point the following is complete:

• Drivers for all the hardware interfaces.


• Parser for the GPS messages (as well as a no message received time out mechanisum)


• Method for storing waypoints and  managing their validity.


• Command parser interface between the Main flight computer and the IIP computer.(Last years version did not have this communications, but this years relies on the II computer to turn the cat valve on and off so the main flight computer needs to tell it when it wants in open/closed)


• Valve driver.


• Battery monitor.

Still to be completeed :

•  Actual IIP code as outlined in the experimental permit application.


• Test Harness code to run on the PC.

 

. After that is complete I need to hook it to a test harness and excercise it. The test harness will look like:

So I have to write a simulator that runs on the PC and flies the veichle around and out of the “box” its supposed to stay in and test what  the IIP computers response is. that will be a significat portion of me weekend. (We also hope to go out to the desert and test again this weekend.)