Sunday, March 20, 2011

Plans Modified....

My Son had work to do this weekend and could not go to FAR.

I chose to cancel rocket testing this weekend and work on my GPS project.
I got the Rakon GMM8652 based front end working.
So now that I have a fully working front end the real work starts.

I'm currently routing the raw data into an FPGA , but instead of doing the processing there I'm just using that as a path to record the data. Recording raw data records (4M bytes/sec) and post processing with the FASTGPS open source software GPS program on a PC.

Next Step do the corelator processing in the FPGA. I have that verilog code written, but its mostly untested at this point.
Rough order of events:

  1. Prove the RF and FPGA hardware works. (done)
  2. Get one correlation channel tracking one sat.
  3. Get 6 or more channels tracking sats.
  4. Calculate position, velocity, time (PVT) based on this tracking data.
  5. Add data delay buffer and feedback from IMU data to aid loop tracking.
  6. Fly the thing.
I will probably take a detour that that records raw IMU and GPS data on some flash memory,
and fly that so we have a good raw data set to use for testing and simulation.

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